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The Season of Love Comes and Goes. Stéphane Brizé's Film is Persuasive and Delicate

“Les Occasions de l’Amour” by Stéphane Brizé investigates feelings and goes deeper beneath the light cloak of comedy.

The Season of Love Comes and Goes. Stéphane Brizé's Film is Persuasive and Delicate

The great English writer Rudyard Kipling used to say that nothing is ever closed until it is closed in the right way. It seems that Stéphane Brizé has made this his own. lesson in his latest beautiful film, “Le occasione dell'amore”, presented at the eightieth edition of the Venice Film Festival and finally in Italian theaters. Guillaume Canet is Mathieu, a successful actor who shows up at the reception of a spa on the French coast for a week of thalassotherapy.

It's winter and it seems a bit out of season (out of season, as the original title of the film) also him. He is lost: his wife, a television journalist, remained in Paris for the too many commitments and he in turn abandoned the production of a stage play four weeks before its debut, fearing he wouldn't be up to par and would ruin a brilliant film career. 

The tone at the beginning is comical: the musical commentary and the sounds of the smartphone in the aseptic silence of the sanatorium - notifications, ringtones, even the audio of the word game Ruzzle - punctuate the days of Mathieu/Canet who pass a little bored between a massage, the diet dishes served under the cloches and the reading of a script. Then a ticket arrives: it's Alice (played by Alba Rohrwacher, bright, very good), who lives in the village and who would like to see him again.

They had been in love, fifteen years before, and their story had ended because of his abandonment. And so, in front of a cup of tea, they tell each other how their lives have gone on: he complains about jazz (it irritates him, sic), of thinning hair, of glasses needed for reading; she reassures him that everything is fine because, she reminds him, he has health, a son, a woman and a job he loves. He agrees that he can't complain but he's not really that convinced.

She smiles at him: she teaches piano, she married a good man and a daughter was born. He listens, he looks at her. But is it enough to say goodbye civilly and take leave of what could have been and wasn't? This is where the film gets to the heart of the relational comparison and becomes a delicate investigation about feelings, aspirations and truths that we are not always able to tell ourselves and tell. We are more in the area of ​​The Bridges of Madison County than in that of Past Lives. 

Stéphane Brizé said he thought of Francesca/Meryl Streep from Eastwood's film when he wrote the character of Alice, a woman who lets herself be conditioned by fear but then finds courage; and also that he experienced the anguish that grips Mathieu, at the height of his success. yet dissatisfied. Written by Brizé himself with Marie Drecker, the film also seems to be the result of a personal reflection that translates, cinematographically, into a pleasant freedom of expression.

Find amusing, curious dialogues and two surprising and poetic interludes: a video interview with Alice's friend on the necessary compromises of married life - looking into the camera, in direct dialogue with the viewer - and the performance of two chioccolatori (imitators of bird song), who entertain the audience with a real concert of trills and warbles. Which is to say jokes and counter jokes, questions and answers.

The figures of the protagonists that stand out on the Atlantic waves and filmed in long shot by the director evoke wounded feelings and slightly bent lives that demand attention and (impossible) compensation. But, Brizé seems to tell us, apologies can be made and relationships can grow through comparison, with oneself and with others. To live new occasions, of life and love.

In the room

Original title: Hors saison; Production: France 2023, Director: Stéphane Brizé, Screenplay: Stéphane Brizé and Marie Drecker, Editing: Anne Klotz, Photography: Antoine Héberlé, Original music: Vincent Delerm, Main actors: Guillaume Canet, Alba Rohrwacher, Sharif Andoura, Lucette Beudin.“Les Occasions de l’Amour” by Stéphane Brizé investigates feelings and goes deeper beneath the light cloak of comedy.

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