An impossible love: Christine Angot in the text (review)

The film which saw the birth of love at first sight between Virginie Efira and Niels Schneider can be seen again this evening, on Arte.

At the end of 2018, Catherine Corsini adapted Christine Angot for a film that was a little too classic, but which made the indispensable Virginie Efira shine. First advise you An impossible love mainly for her.

Madeleine Collins: Virginie Efira impressive (review)

Filmmaker of prevented love and femininity in all its forms, Catherine Corsini had unknowingly taken a date with Christine Angot from whom she adapts An impossible lovea story of the close relationship between a mother and her daughter with, hovering above them, the evil shadow of the absent lover and progenitor.

Subtly photographed by Jeanne Lapoirie, the film fits at first glance into the genre “French quality” with its impeccable reconstruction, its literary voice-over and its great subject. Told from the mother’s point of view, performed by a Virginie Efira while restrained, An impossible love is first of all the classic story of an unmarried mother in conservative France of the 50s and 60s.

Without ostentation, Corsini salutes the courage of these courageous women who had to deal with the views of others and flourish in adversity. Then, the film turns into a chronicle of perversion through the character of the lover/father whose class contempt (towards the one he has seduced and abandoned to his fate) will be cloaked in abjection.

If Angot never minced her words, Corsini shows nothing, leaving the viewer to reconstruct the missing scenes of the intimate drama experienced by little Chantal. The director is, however, obliged to fill this terrible off-camera with an overflow of literal explanations which somewhat attenuates its impact but does not prevent the film from being part of a necessary effort of resilience.

Virginie Efira: “I was convinced that Adieu les idiots would find its audience”