The title of Katell Quillévéré’s first movie,Un Poison Violent from 2010, was taken from Serge Gainsbourg’s song Un poison violent, c’est ça l’amour, and the awful toxicity of love is a theme that has run through her work ever since. It is an underground stream that has become very much an overground stream in this new, heartfelt movie. It’s robust and a little unsubtle, without the nuances and indirections that govern her best work, but handsomely produced and resoundingly performed, avowedly autobiographical and inspired by her grandmother. Quillévéré has said that her influences are Maurice Pialat for the tough realism and Douglas Sirk for the melodrama and the sense of buried shame. I wonder if there isn’t some David Lean in there for the final scene at the railway station.
Madeleine is a young single mother played by Anaïs Demoustier; working as a waitress on the Brittany coast just after the second world war, in a uniform requiring her hair to be tied up in a ridiculous white bow, she has a difficult five-year-old son, Daniel. She meets a shy, sweet, bespectacled young man, François Delambre (a performance as sturdily intelligent as Demoustier’s from Vincent Lacoste), who is a postgraduate student in Paris, and from a wealthy local family, self-conscious about a limp caused by childhood polio.
They fall in love and marry – poignantly, perhaps unconsciously drawn to each other by the fact that each has a secret. François is gay (in an era when this was a serious criminal offence), but with this new relationship has taken an earnest decision to put it behind him. And Madeleine’s child was conceived through a relationship with a German officer during the occupation, for which she was shamed and head-shaved by jeering locals in her now abandoned home town – that notorious, ugly French phenomenon of the liberation in which the menfolk, to distract from their own more serious Nazi collaboration, took it misogynistically out on the women.
As the 1950s turn into the 60s, Madeleine runs a bar and François pursues an academic career and they drift in and out of a somewhat underpowered folie à trois with an American GI called Jimmy (Morgan Bailey) – a narrative deadend. They become a bourgeois family with another child, a daughter, but François’s self-hating homosexuality resurfaces, that part of him without which he paradoxically would not have found Madeleine, the genuine love of his life. Meanwhile, Daniel is angrily obsessed with his biological father, who probably died on the eastern front.
This is a very eventful period film that covers a lot of storytelling ground and is acted with forthright confidence. And yet, despite or because of it being based on reality, I found myself not quite believing in the parts or the whole. But its fervency and its eroticism give the film its currency.
Along Came Love is in UK cinemas from 30 May.