Powerful

Excellent adaptation.

Absolutely the worst movie.

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

This film has many fine elements, but suffers from the same ennui as the couple it portrays. I picked this up at my library, and knew immediately I had seen it before, but couldn't remember the end, and had to ride the "fast forward" to get through it! It didn't get better with a second viewing! A bored neurosurgeon "hits a rough patch" with his trophy wife, who sublimates her loneliness with her trophy home and garden! It reminds me of a flaccid remake of Haneke's "Cache", with Auteuil reprising his role as the stone-walling husband, who is smitten by a young Moroccan woman, who may be stalking him with roses instead of surveillance! Kristin Scott Thomas plays the long-suffering wife, instead of Juliette Binoche.The film also has a couple of disparate elements that could easily have been cut, mainly Lucie's psychotic sister, and a Polish patient's Holocast survival story.This is a fine distraction, if you have nothing else to watch!

Avant l'hiver is a charming European film driven by its complex historical subtext revealed gradually by small details of everyday life and by wonderful performances by great actors in 'small', intimate roles in which they asked to convey deeply-felt emotions while staying firmly within the social and moral limits of staid bourgeois lives. This is European film-making at its best, with intelligent people exploring what it means to be settled, successful and bourgeois. But their angst is not about grubbing for money, power and status while losing one's soul, we soon find out. Paul (Daniel Auteuil) is a long-married neurosurgeon married to Lucie (Kristin Scott-Thomas). He begins to receive anonymous bouquets of flowers at work and at home. He suspects a young woman, Lou (Leila Bekhti), who works at his local bistro. Several confrontations occur: in the street, at a florist. She denies everything. It seems inconsequential till Paul sees Lou working the streets as a prostitute around the stadium. He slowly becomes obsessed with her, even breaking into his best friend's Gérard's office, a psychiatrist who Lou is seeing, to find her address. Paul and Lou meet several times. Paul is not interested in sex. Nor is he interested in love; this is not an affair. He hungers more for her past, for her story of how she came to be what she is. Slowly, we learn that she is a French-Algerian raised in France but estranged from her self-centered parents. Paul is drawn to the narrative of her past struggles to find herself. She even at one point reveals that she does work occasionally as a prostitute, who only becomes more intrigued as he comes to see that her complicated present is the natural outcome of her complicated past. Unlike him, Lou is apparently more true to herself despite being on the low end of the social scale: she is a barmaid, a student, a prostitute (or so it seems). He is the alienated one, despite success and a beautiful wife who still loves him. We slowly piece together Paul's hunger for the past through a series of little episodes. The night before he is to operate an old woman, she reveals that she is the sole survivor of a family exterminated by the Holocaust, the daughter of refugee Polish parents who fled to France before the war but who were nonetheless sent to the death camps. She recites the names of her parents, brothers and sister, stating that if she does not survive the operation she wants at least one person to know that these people existed. The next day, he freezes during the delicate operation and is saved by his assistant, who takes over. In another pivotal scene, Paul argues with his best friend Gérard, who reveals what everyone knows: for thirty years Gérard has been in love with Lucie, Paul's wife. We learn that all three met at the same time, but we deduce that Lucie chose Paul while staying close friends with Gérard. There is never a hint of impropriety in their relationship, except one: when Paul breaks into his friend's office to find Lou's address, he finds an old photo of him, his wife and their son. Why does Gérard have this in his desk drawer? He gains access to Gérard's computer by using his son's name. Is the estranged son (Victor) really Gérard's? It seems unlikely, since Lucie is morally upright and supportive of her husband Paul despite his emotional crisis. Later, Gérard tells Paul that if he had one chance to lead his life over, it would be with Lucie. We deduce that Gérard wishes Victor were his son and not Paul's. These plot points, however, are not really about love and success, which could be explored in any intelligent American film analysing professional success and emotional failure. Here, everything pivots on the past and its role in the present. Paul, we learn, is not emotionally distant because of overwork or because he still has a teenage hormonal outlook on women (he never strays sexually from his wife, and when Lou blatantly offers to have sex, he is repulsed by her coarse language, not by the proposition). He is emotionally disconnected to those around him because he in a sense has no past. We learn that Paul is the son of an American soldier temporarily stationed in France who abandoned the family. Paul is essentially an orphan, a foreigner, a bastard, a self-made man who has created a present by hard work that, we learn, never left him enough time to connect to his own family. We also learn that Lou desperately tries to establish her real roots when Paul tracks her down (her name, history, and status as an art history student are all false). In a poignant scene, she insists he listen to an old tape of her mother singing a childhood ditty in French and Arabic. She gives him the tape, asks him to leave and, we learn later, commits suicide. We learn later that she too was an orphan, though a murderous one who sought out lonely and vulnerable men such as Paul to exploit and kill them. Finally, when the old woman survives the operation, Paul recites back to her the names of her murdered family. He smiles, he remembers. He finally has a past, after losing Lou's. The problem, though, is that it is not his. He escapes from a family barbecue to listen to Lou's tape. This I think is the major theme in the film. People who cannot connect to the past cannot live in the present, as the old woman whose past was stolen from her realises. As much as Paul cannot claim his own past, he hungers for other people's stories: he remembers the old patient's story; he is touched by Lou's fictive past; he is curiously attracted to nature and its rhythms of death and rebirth. All in all, a thoughtful film with wonderful actors, script and camera work.

Novelist turned film-maker Philippe Claudel is covering all bases with Avant l'Hiver (Before the Winter Chill). His third outing as a director is part psychological thriller, part classic love triangle and part domestic drama with Daniel Auteuil once again showing masterly control over a storyline that crawls along at a snail's pace leaving plenty of room for angst ridden introspection and moody silences.Auteuil is Paul, a 60-something successful neurosurgeon who is married to Lucie (Kristen Scott- Thomas) and BFF with Gerard (Richard Berry). The couple have been married for thirty years and if the union lacks a certain spark, they are happy enough entertaining friends, spending evenings at the opera and weekends with the family. The routine is shattered when Paul starts to receive bouquets of red roses from a mysterious admirer. Suspicion falls on a beautiful, young Moroccan woman Lou (Leila Bekhti), a waitress in a cafe who claims she is one of his former patients. Initially unconcerned by the unwanted attention, Paul gradually becomes intrigued by Lou who reels him in with tales of her difficult childhood and her struggles as an art student in France. Before long, he has left the comfortable family home to spend more time with Lou. Seeing a rift in the marriage, Gerard confesses his love for Lucie who is reeling from the shock of discovering her husband's interest in another woman and the disintegration of her safe, middle class existence. But worse is to come as it becomes apparent Lou is not the woman she says she is.Putting the French middle class under the microscope is a path well-trodden by, among others, veteran director Claude Sautet – the man behind such classics as Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud and the not dissimilarly titled Un Coeur en Hiver (A Heart in Winter) also starring Daniel Auteuil. But where Sautet cast a non-too critical eye over the lives and loves of the bourgeoisie, Claudel depicts a group of people irritatingly smug in their selfish acceptance of the privilege that comes with their money and status. As Gerard bitterly points out to Paul, his only real problem is that life has been too good to him. He has a beautiful wife, a beautiful home and a career where he is admired and respected – an enviable position for most people in the 'autumn' of their existence . And yet he questions whether his life could have been different/ improved. Lucie is a similarly cold, unsympathetic character. Despite a faultless performance by Scott-Thomas, it's impossible to warm to someone who complains her days are long and empty as if the blame lies with someone else. For Paul, Gerard and Lucie, their lives have been about choices and their constant navel gazing seems almost comically self-indulgent. It falls to Bekhti to inject some relief from the suffocating, tangled relationships between the three main protagonists. Unfortunately her character is not consistent enough to offer a fresh perspective on the unfolding drama and she fails to make a real impression.

That's exactly what I waited for. Daniel Auteuil is here as excellent as ever. I have always considered him as one of the best french actors ever. The poignant and sensitive tale of a wealthy surgeon who has a boring life, boring wife and family, a job that brings him to burn out and whose fate leads him to meet a young woman.The following is totally unforeseeable. The relationship that develops between the two of them is not what you might expect. It is so odd that it is impossible to describe. Offbeat at the most, but so pure and beautiful. This is not a romance. Unfortunately, the - near - ending is very abrupt and may disturb the audiences. But it doesn't destroy the story's quality.It is only unusual, far from you may have waited for in such kind of stories.