La Séparation movie storyline. One night at the cinema, Pierre reaches for out to take Anne’s hand. She is annoyed and rebuffs him. He feels rejected. This moment begins the story of the disintegration of a couple… Pierre and Anne live in Paris with their two-year-old child Louis.
After the night in the cinema it is clear that Anne is distracted and the small gulf between them seems to widen as time goes on. Lunches, evenings out with friends, there’s obvoiusly something wrong. One night after a party, Anne tells Pierre that she is in love with another man.
Although her confession is not surprising, Pierre’s reaction is. He seems to accept it as a fact of life and refrains from asking the most burning questions. However, as Anne continues to see the other man, Pierre’s feelings become more violent and it begins to dawn on them that some thing intangible has happened that can’t be put right.
La Séparation is a 1994 French romantic drama film directed by Christian Vincent and based on the novel La Séparation by Dan Franck. It stars Isabelle Huppert, Daniel Auteuil, Jérôme Deschamps, Karin Viard, Laurence Lerel, Louis Vincent, Nina Morato, Jean-Jacques Vanier and Christian Benedetti.
Film Review for La Séparation
”In a couple, one suffers and the other one’s bored and vice versa.” This bitter little epigram, spoken near the beginning of ”La Separation” and repeated later, sets the tone of this small, exquisitely acted French film that traces the deterioration of a marriage gone stale.
Pierre (Daniel Auteuil), a book illustrator, and Anne (Isabelle Huppert), a businesswoman, appear to have a serene domestic partnership until one night while at the movies Pierre caresses his wife’s hand and she impatiently pulls it away. When they arrive home, he asks her what was wrong and she tells him he was bothering her.
It isn’t so much the words that are exchanged as the actors’ facial expressions and body language that tell the sad story of Pierre and Anne’s unraveling partnership. Ms. Huppert’s Anne is a glum, shifty-eyed enigma. In those rare moments when she can bring herself to meet Pierre’s pleading gaze, she stares back him with a clenched jaw and a look of blank, defiant fury.
Pierre, on his part, is initially fearful, abject and courtly. But when Anne spills the beans and announces she has fallen in love with another man, his hurt pride and jealousy begin to simmer. It takes weeks before they reach full boil in a harrowing scene of domestic violence reminiscent of the battle royal in Ingmar Bergman’s ”Scenes From a Marriage.”
The couple have a little boy, Loulou, who is 15 months old when the movie begins. Brief sections of the film consist of Pierre’s home videotapes taken of his baby son while he delivers an impromptu voice-over narration.
”La Separation,” which opens today at the Quad Cinema, doesn’t pretend to be an in-depth exploration of Pierre and Anne’s relationship. We are never shown Anne’s lover, nor is his identity revealed. And except for her remembering an early date in which he cooked dinner for her, there are no recollections of Pierre and Anne’s better days.
The movie, directed by Christian Vincent, who wrote the screenplay with Dan Franck, gives only a flavor of the nagging, petty conflicts that have accumulated into a crisis. They are annoyances as small and recurrent as Pierre’s forever forgetting to turn off the lights and the television set.
We never observe Pierre and Anne in bed, nor does the film give any sense of the couple’s physical chemistry or lack of it. Even after Anne claims to have fallen in love with someone else, she insists that she hasn’t stopped loving Pierre, although there are few signs to support that assertion. When she embraces him, she seems to be reaching out to console him rather than to express any love. The film’s biggest flaw is its lack of evenhandedness. The movie is clearly on Pierre’s side.
But there is a reason the movie leaves out so much crucial information. By not giving a marital history, it forces us to see for ourselves what is the matter. It has to do with a lack of communication.
Like so many couples — maybe like most couples at some points in their marriages — Pierre and Anne have settled into a routine in which everything is taken for granted and nothing discussed. Petty grievances, brushed away in the interests of maintaining the comfortable status quo, are stored up. But once one partner begins exacting revenge, a destructive chain reaction is set off that is impossible to control.
”La Separation” shows us a hundred small failures of communication that have created the gulf: the small gestures of refusal and disgust, the meaningful looks that are not followed up with words and the negative power that comes from withholding, evading and keeping the lid on.
La Séparation (1994)
Directed by: Christian Vincent
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Daniel Auteuil, Jérôme Deschamps, Karin Viard, Laurence Lerel, Louis Vincent, Nina Morato, Jean-Jacques Vanier, Christian Benedetti
Screenplay by: Dan Franck, Christian Vincent
Production Design by: Christian Vallerin
Cinematography by: Denis Lenoir, Anne Nicolet, Virginie Saint-Martin
Film Editing by: François Ceppi, Véronique Ilié, Laurence Vanier
Costume Design by: Sylvie Gautrelet, Paule Mangenot
Art Direction by: Bruno Madesclaire, Louise Marzaroli, Annie Touquet, Christian Vallerin
Distributed by: AMLF
Release Date: November 9, 1994
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