Director Katell Quillévéré delivers a powerful period drama exploring the harsh realities of love through the story of a shamed mother and a closeted husband.
Quillévéré first gained recognition in 2010 with Poison Friends, a film titled after Serge Gainsbourg’s song “Poison Love,” establishing the toxic nature of love as a recurring theme in her work. In this deeply moving new film, that undercurrent flows more openly on the surface. While the film is robust and occasionally somewhat blunt, lacking the subtlety and nuance of her finest work, it is well-crafted, with compelling performances and a clear autobiographical influence drawn from the director’s grandmother. Quillévéré has cited influences including Maurice Pialat’s hard-edged realism and Douglas Sirk’s dramatic tension, alongside an exploration of buried shame. The final train station scene invites comparison to the style of David Lean.
The film centers on Madeleine (played by Anaïs Demoustier), a young single mother shortly after World War II, working as a waitress on the Brittany coast. Dressed in uniform and wearing a conspicuous white bow, she struggles to care for her difficult five-year-old son, Daniel. She meets François Delambre (portrayed by Vincent Lacoste), a shy, intelligent, bespectacled young man from a wealthy Parisian family, who walks with a limp caused by childhood polio and feels deep shame about it.
They fall in love and marry — a poignant union perhaps unconsciously drawn together by their respective secrets. François is a homosexual, which at the time was a serious criminal offense, but this new relationship motivates him to try to suppress his true desires. Madeleine’s child was conceived during an affair with a German officer during the occupation, which led to her public humiliation and head shaving by locals in her now abandoned hometown — a notorious and ugly practice in post-liberation France, where men vented their hatred of women to deflect attention from their own Nazi collaboration.
As the story moves from the 1950s into the 1960s, Madeleine runs a bar while François pursues an academic career. The couple becomes involved in a somewhat dull “threesome” with an American soldier named Jimmy (played by Morgan Bailey), a narrative cul-de-sac. They gradually establish a bourgeois family and have a daughter. Yet François’s self-loathing over his sexuality resurfaces, paradoxically reminding us that without this part of him, he would never have met Madeleine — the love of his life. Meanwhile, Daniel harbors anger and obsession toward his biological father, who likely died on the Eastern Front.
This is a richly layered period film with confident performances. However, despite—or perhaps because of—its basis in reality, some parts of the film and its overall narrative can feel unconvincing. Nonetheless, its passion and eroticism lend the movie a certain allure.
You Won’t Be Alone opens in UK cinemas on 30 May.
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