There are, Luis Buñuel once said, only a few stories to tell but hundreds of ways to tell them. Catherine Corsini’s film has a bourgeois French woman leaving her husband and children for a working-class Spaniard who has been making alterations to her home.
It’s an old, old story — but Kristin Scott Thomas is so good as Suzanne, the wife in question, that the result is intriguing.
She leaves home because passion rather than good sense dictates it — the lover (Sergi Lopez) has done time in prison and is unlikely to be able to support her. She has no financial independence and is completely at the mercy of her furious husband (Yvan Attal).
Almost out of nothing, Scott Thomas, ably supported by Lopez and Attal, produces a performance that suggests both the strength to desert her comfortable life and the vulnerability to understand the desperate nature of that decision. You believe in Suzanne utterly.
Leaving (Partir)
Cert: 15
