Doomed lovers in a strange land

Leaving, a French film starring Kristin Scott Thomas (left), is a radical approach to a classic love story. Photo / Supplied

A shot rings out in the first few moments of the French romantic thriller, Leaving. We have a pretty good idea of who has fired the gun - only one character is awake in the darkened house - but we will spend the next 85 minutes of the film's lean running time wondering where it was pointing at the time.

Thus the film cleverly extends Hitchcock's famous pronouncement about suspense, a subject he knew a bit about. "There's no terror in the bang of the gun," the old maestro said, "only in the anticipation of it." Leaving gives us both: the gunshot that shatters the midnight silence in the handsome house startles us, and anticipating who died keeps us on the edge of our seats.

Director Catherine Corsini says she wanted to take "a radical approach to a classical love story". A bookworm as a child, she grew up fascinated with doomed romantic heroines like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. And, she says, they have much in common with Scott Thomas' character, Suzanne, "a woman who dares to go for the adventure".

Suzanne is a woman whose life is upended by a passion that she is powerless to resist. And the opening gunshot gives the film a headlong, heated pace from the first minute.

It imparts, Corsini says, "a pure impulsion" to a story about "bodies looking to come together or flee".

The beautiful and bored wife of a doctor, living in bourgeois prosperity in Nimes, in the south of France, Suzanne decides to start work again at her old profession of physiotherapy.

Her husband, Samuel (Yvan Attal), is dismissive but condescends to hire someone to convert a backyard shed to a consulting room.

Enter Ivan (Sergi Lopez), a Spanish odd-job man with an old truck, a dodgy past and a smouldering intensity.

Devoid of subplots and complications - at least one of the two lovers is on screen for the entire film - Leaving has the narrative trajectory of a high-velocity bullet.

It also has a tragic inevitability about it, but we are dragged into the story by the two main performances.

Corsini says she was determined to cast Scott Thomas, who dazzled as a newly released murderer in last year's I've Loved You So Long.

"She has a quality that was just perfect for the role," she says.

"She is melancholic and slightly vulnerable but she has a passionate resolve in her too. She is a great actress and it is only the French cinema that is giving her the parts she deserves, because French filmmakers find a great fascination in women of a certain age.

"In the US, it gets more difficult for a woman to find good parts."

The intensity of the film's central drama is heightened by the surroundings: Nimes in summer seems to swelter in sympathy with the characters' passions. Beneath Thomas' bare collarbones you can actually see her heart beating at times. And the characters' isolation is underscored by the fact that they - like the actors who play them - are not native French. Suzanne's English background is explained in a line of dialogue and Ivan is, like Lopez, a Catalan from Barcelona. It makes them strangers in a strange land, explains Corsini.

"It is because they are two foreigners that they are able to make the system of French bourgeoisie explode as they do. They are not part of the system; they are the outcasts."

That idea drives a scene in which Suzanne and Ivan speak to each other in their respective native languages, knowing that neither can understand the other. The effect is drop-dead romantic - Corsini says it allows them to be "more daring", as if they haven't already been daring enough - but in highlighting their differences it also seems to prefigure their inevitable separation.

Corsini rejects the notion that Leaving is a feminist film. "In the end, the woman is punished," she says, as though it were obvious. But she goes on to deliver what sounds very much like an old-fashioned feminist analysis.

"It is important to show that women can be victims when the power is in the man's hands. We see in the film that Suzanne earns no money and so the bank won't lend her any money without her husband's permission. She has to confront the reality of that: she comes from a privileged background and yet she has no power. It is her husband who is very well-known in the town. He knows all the notables, the bankers and so forth and they are all on his side." Whatever its subtext, Leaving is, in the end, the very model of a tragic love story. Love, says Corsini, allows Suzanne to break out of the prison her life has constructed for her. "And despite everything, despite all the ordeals, love triumphs. That's the classical model. It doesn't matter what happens to the lovers, the love endures."

LOWDOWN

Who:French director Catherine Corsini

What: Leaving (Partir) starring Kristin Scott Thomas

When: Opens at cinemas on Thursday