We're all familiar with the old line, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." Men can do equally well in the fury department, as amply demonstrated in "Leaving," by Yvan Attel, as Samuel, when his wife gets involved with another man. The French import opens here today.
The movie opens with a midnight gunshot, then flashes back six months so that we can find out who is firing the gun, and at whom, and why.
Suzanne (Kristen Scott Thomas) is Samuel's wife, Ivan (Sergei Lopez) the other man in a rather dull, uninvolving tale whose most impressive time comes while people are driving through the lovely scenery that southern France provides. Samuel is a successful physician who is well-connected in the town, Suzanne is preparing to go back to work as a physiotherapist as her children go through their teen-age years. Ivan enters as a workman who is helping rehab an outbuilding on their property that will be her office and treatment room.
It's as plain as the nose on your face that Suzanne and Ivan are going to end up in the sack, and it happens with all the requisite gasps and gutteral sounds and rolling eyes and post-coital naps that the act demands on screen.
And then there are recriminations and anger and tears and promises and the breaking thereof. Keep watching the scenery.
Leaving opens today at the Plaza Frontenac.
—Joe