Passion simple

It was a very good adaptation of a very short book. It is nothing new exactly but it really shows what passion looks like from the inside.

The woman is head over heels in love with a Russian man, who is possibly a spy. She does not care that he is married, or that he decides when and where they meet. She relinquishes all power in this relationship that she has succombed to. She still manages to work but can barely function as a mother. Everything and everyone come second to this man she knows nothing about. They don't have an intellectual or spiritual connection. All they do is have sex together but she is addicted to him and there is nothing she can do about it.

Don't expect any action. It's a film about a French modern woman, a mother and a college professor, who yearns for a beautiful and mysterious man that she can never hope to be with. It's a good film from a good book whose title says it all without any pretence or complicated ambitions.

Summery: Lifetime/Harlequined treatment; female desire as desperation

The French make great films. And we are fortunate in the US to get the best of them. But as a frequent visitor to France, I can tell you there are also some pretty bad French films -- and Passion Simple is one of those.

The characters and their actions don't make any sense. Essentially while there is a veneer of physicality, and a forced artificial, frankly bad, eroticism; the main thing going on is a woman with an obsessive emotional attachment to a married guy. Ok that happens. A lot. Women often enough imagine a guy for what they are not. And guys play that along. But this film brings nothing, new, dramatic, or even interesting to the table in the gigantic genre of women falling for a guys who lies, or worse yet is apathetic.

A camera that is sensitive in the moments it should, such as: focusing on the skin, the sensation and sounds of the environment and the changes in the protagonist's emotions, it starts off intimate, suffocating when the romance is beginning and becomes more distant in moments of doubt, reflections of the protagonist, to corroborate the feminine point of view of the plot. Sex is present in the first half of the film, as expected from a lovers' film, but it seems mechanical and false to us who are watching, it only seems to make sense for the protagonist, who delights and misses it. I liked the idea of the protagonist being a university professor who teaches about literature and trying to create her novels, a contrast between reading about romance and experiencing them, which brings us a human reflection that even though she has knowledge about romantic novels and their endings, she She appears to have no regrets about her decision, she willingly embraces her choice, telling us that it is worth making "some" mistakes and feeling certain emotions.

The book (of the same name) that this film is based upon is only about 40 or 50 pages long and can be read in a couple of hours. The film adaption doesn't provide any narrator, so it's easy to be lost as to the point of particular scenes, e.g. The hairdresser scene is difficult to comprehend without the author's internal thoughts.

If you go in with the context of the author's emotional state and thoughts, the imagery in the film brings the text alive.

The author, Annie Ernaux, won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. She bares her soul in her work, and that's why I wanted to see the film, and the result was worth watching.

I must say that I didn't expect that I would watch more than 15 minutes of this movie.

Hence, I was pleasantly surprised that somehow the movie got me interested.

I'm a man.

This movie is essentially from a woman viewpoint. Perhaps it would therefore appeal to many women rather than men ?

Regardless, the central character actress got my attention into her spiralling descent into a highly addictive, highly dependent physical relationship.

It contrasts with her life which is being an intellectual , a lecturer at the University.

It also doesn't agree with her role as a single mother.

Good movie that shows how "love", or at least the perception of being in love, can lead to disaster.