Out of Season

Hors-saison

Michael Crotto

VERDICT: An unexpected story of loneliness and yearning from Stéphane Brizé in which two former lovers come face-to-face with the disappointments of life, beautiful in its understatement and cinematic restraint yet still generating tremendous poignancy.

The “what ifs” of life are having their moment, as the popularity of Past Lives can testify. What if we didn’t miss that opportunity, that relationship, that possibility? Stéphane Brizé attributes his own rumination on the theme to pandemic lockdown, when isolation triggered a re-evaluation of the choices we’ve made, resulting in his studiously low-key, achingly melancholy Out of Season. Comfortably slotting into the category of films shot in lonely off-peak seaside hotels, this calm, reflective drama about a famed movie actor in crisis and the unfulfilled woman he dumped sixteen years earlier has none of the socialist anger the director is best known for, burrowing instead into the feelings of loneliness and yearning when these former lovers meet again. Antoine Heberlé’s beautifully restrained camerawork places these two adults grappling with life’s disappointments on a cool yet charged canvas, hesitantly expressing their insecurity and longing through excellent dialogue by Brizé and co-writer Marie Drucker. With the right marketing, Out of Season could get international art house attention.

With Vincent Delerm’s prominent though surprisingly effective music mixing synthesizer with other instruments, and the lightly washed-out tonalities, there’s a very 1970s French vibe here, harking back to that fruitful era of French relationship dramas. Mathieu (Guillaume Canet) arrives alone at a thalassotherapy spa in Brittany, having booked a week-long “Well-being plus” package. The place feels more dead than soothing, populated by a few elderly guests in vast spaces where barely a sound bounces off a wall or carpet. His fame isolates him further from people who only interact to take a selfie together, and his celebrity TV presenter wife (voiced by Drucker) is difficult to get on the phone.

He’s in crisis: he just bailed from his first theater performance, four weeks before opening, and the director is furious. Everything had been announced, there was even a Paris Match profile in which he talked about this exciting risk-taking plunge, but now he feels like a massive disappointment, not least to himself. His distracted wife has no insight and tells Mathieu to just move on and get back to being a movie star, but he’s damaged his sense of self-worth and is struggling to keep himself together.

Then he gets a note from Alice (Alba Rohrwacher), an old girlfriend he’s not seen in sixteen years. She lives in town, heard he was there, and suggests they meet. At lunch they reconnect, filling in the information gap with talk of spouses and kids: she teaches piano, is married to a doctor, Xavier (Sharif Andoura), and has a teenager daughter. Mathieu holds back on revealing his depression while Alice leaves just enough out to detect that something is missing from her life, aurally reinforced by elegiac piano music. Through a montage of vignettes the audience understands that she’s got everything in life yet clearly something is missing – she has an affectionate companionship with Xavier but no passion, and she’s filled with “what might have been” when she sees Mathieu, pointedly reminding him that he ditched her and revealing her sense that he was quickly moving up in the world while she was a “nobody.”

Brizé includes a remarkable interview at a retirement home conducted by Alice of a woman in her late 70s named Lucette Beudin which mixes docu and fiction since Lucette and her story are presumably real. The older woman talks about her life as a young bride married to a man for whom she had gratitude combined with a reasonable affection but no love: “I made do with the situation” she tells Alice, speaking of marital duties with no thought to pleasure. Only when her husband died did she allow herself to act upon her same-sex desires, and now she’s about to marry her true love, Gilberte. The interview takes a longer chunk of time than expected, making the resonance with Alice’s situation ever clearer, not in a queer sense but rather in the kind of superficial contentment that had them both treading water through life.

It’s not giving away too much to say that Mathieu and Alice end up in his hotel room where their arms wrap around each other, grasping for a lover who understands them, who can fill that emptiness inside. Neither is able to fully share the chasm of disappointments, largely in themselves, that brought them to this precipice of loneliness, but for a brief time their physical intimacy conveys what they cannot verbalize. Alba Rohrwacher is especially fine as Alice, her self-consciously imperfect French (in the film) adding a further level of insecurity to this fragile, tender woman still hurting from Mathieu’s rejection so many years earlier. She’s well-matched by Guillaume Canet, whose Mathieu is stressed to breaking point though he’s enough of an actor (and a man) to hide it in front of others.

Brizé makes Mathieu’s loneliness more exposed than Alice’s, setting him in the hotel’s large spaces of pale blues, off-whites and beiges that underline his solitude. Given that humor isn’t quite what one tends to remember about a Brizé film, the number of funny moments scattered throughout acts as unexpectedly welcome counterpoints to the overall sense of loss. With its sparse characters and sense of containment, Out of Season feels like a film conceived in the wake of the pandemic, suffused with acute poignancy and a mournful awareness that fulfillment is evanescent, easily consumed in the vacuum of dispassionate relations.

 

Director: Stéphane Brizé
Screenplay: Stéphane Brizé, Marie Drucker
Cast: Guillaume Canet, Alba Rohrwacher, Sharif Andoura, Lucette Beudin, Marie Drucker
Producer: Sidonie Dumas
Cinematography: Antoine Heberlé
Production designer: Mathieu Menut
Costume designer: Caroline Spieth
Editing: Anne Klotz
Music: Vincent Delerm
Sound: Emmanuelle Villard
Production companies: Gaumont (France), France 3 Cinéma (France), Caneo Film (France)
World sales: Gaumont
Venue: Venice (competition)
In French
115 minutes