Partir (Leaving)

Bea says: A promising storyline and at least one big name (Kristen Scott-Thomas) - this could have been so much better. The first half to two-thirds was indeed quite good, the plot following Kristen Scott-Thomas as she began to try to break free from her stifling upper middle class life in provincial France (married to a doctor, two teenage kids, no life of her own etc).

When trying to return to her profession as a physiotherapist, she meets Spanish builderIvan, who is building treatment rooms for her at the family home, and they begin a passionate affair. Kristen Scott-Thomas' character gets in deeper and deeper, confessing all to her doctor husband (cue highly emotional scene between the two of them, which is realistic and well done), and leaving him for a life of squalor and poverty with Ivan.

So far so good - the stresses and strains this would have placed on their "love" would have been good to explore - what would she have done, faced with a life of council flats and fruit picking? Would her feelings have lasted, or would she have returned to her husband after all?.

However, the plot then loses it somewhat and the female character behaves in increasingly desperate and odd ways - selling her Cartier watch at a petrol station to pay for fuel, "robbing" her own home of expensive art and getting Ivan (who has a criminal record) to sell it on, with disastrous consequences, which ulitmately lead to her returning to her husband and the film's difficult to believe climax. The histrionics take away from what could have been a subtle and powerful exploration of a not commonly examined area of female life.
**1/2

Cecil says: Regular readers will know how important a film's opening scene is in my view for setting the tone and atmosphere. Here we had a still shot of a staircase at night with the only sound that of cicadas, so we knew it was somewhere hot, but then came the crisp crackling sound of...popcorn from the couple behind us in the cinema. I really do hate the noise of sweet wrappings, the crunch of popcorn and the slurp of fizzy drinks being sucked through a straw. So 'Leaving' made me feel like doing just that since the popcorn continued through most of the film...

The film should have grabbed me more easily, I thought. English person living in France (been there, though never in Nimes); professional reflexologist (done that, though not full-time); passionate affair (ahem, NOT done that, but it's always interesting to watch...).

But I felt little empathy for any of the three main characters. In fact, the person I could relate to most was the teenage son, dealing with his conflict of loyalties between two parents going in different directions. But his was very much a cameo role. The husband was odious; the Spanish builder was a Spanish builder, ex-con; and Kristen Scott-Thomas just kept doing unbelievable things, as Bea says.

So, how about the sex scenes? (I was talking recently to someone who judges a film on the quality of the sex scenes). They were passionate for sure, but they also made me feel like a voyeur; was this because I had little empathy for either of the main characters or was it intentional on the part of the director? The film focused mainly on the Scott-Thomas character, and the director was a woman, so you could expect the sex scenes to focus on the woman's view or perceptions of what was going on; but - maybe because of camera angles (pretty hard to film up from the bed??) - aside from close-ups of Kristen's face at key moments, they didn't feel terribly new or different from many other male-directed films.

And the ending. I shan't give it away, but is that REALLY a likely outcome for such an affair???

**.5