The night that Louis (Louis Garrel) tells his wife Clothilde (Rebeca Convenant) that he is leaving her, their eight-year-old daughter Charlotte (Olga Milshtein) peeps at the scene through a keyhole before retreating to her bed. Louis, an actor, has fallen in love with Claudia (Anna Mouglalis), an actress who hasn't been employed for six years. "I can handle being broke but not being poor," she tells Louis who takes her complaint as a sign of unhappiness. She calls their apartment a dump with no light.
Claudia does have her moments when she shines: certainly that is what happens during her first encounter with Charlotte. The little girl is very close to Louis and one would expect her to be threatened by this new woman in his life. But she isn't and returning home to tell her mother about meeting Claudia, she calls her "absolutely awesome."
Philippe Garrel directs this French romantic drama of love and betrayal shot in black-and-white. The only one who stays the same from start to finish is Charlotte who clings to her father's love and adoration with the fierceness of a drowning girl. Although Louis claims to have been faithful to Claudia, his body responds in heated ways to an actress he is working with and a babysitter. Claudia allows herself to be picked up at a bar by a handsome stranger. She tells him that she likes secrets before they go off to have sex.
Jealousy reveals the emotional suffering that results from being jilted as the characters who undergo this process sink immediately into sadness. But the key to their dissatisfaction is loneliness.
The filmmaker has captured the social isolation that comes to those whose relationships are characterized by what Louise Bernikow has called a "tumbleweed feeling, drifting along, disconnected, surrounded by empty space." You can be in an intimate relationship and still feel adrift and alone.
Screened at The 51st New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center.
