Mademoiselle Chambon

I am not a romance films lover. I prefer brutal, thrilled and action movies; not for the squeamish. But this one, totally different, is a masterpiece for me. A real monument of fineness, sensibility and emotion. Kiberlain and Lindon were, not so long ago, a couple in real life. That explains everything on the screen. Some sequences are outsanding.

When shy Lindon asks shy Kiberlain to play a disc of HER music, and when they listen to it, side by side, I felt warmth under my skin. An unforgettable moment. Pure emotion. At one hundred per cent.

And the sequence at Lindon's father's anniversary, when Kiberlain plays violin, her eyes closed, plunged into her music, her world, her soul. At this moment, Lindon's wife stares at her husband's face, and Kiberlain's one. And she understands. Everything. But keeps this for her.

I won't spoil the end of this real gem. But, believe me, all long this story, I felt my eyes wet.

One of the highest compliments I can pay a movie is that, after watching it, I find it hard to watch other movies. I am a huge movie fan and such films are rare. "Mademoiselle Chambon" is that kind of a movie. After watching it, I couldn't watch any other film, so I just watched "Mademoiselle Chambon" again. "Mademoiselle Chambon" does the best job of any film I've ever seen at capturing one particular life experience.

Some loves make sense and fit neatly into our life narratives. We fall in love with a person because we've had extended contact with that person. We know that he is of an appropriate age, social class, belief system, and occupation. We agree with this person on politics, music, and food. We have long talks with these rational loves, and share life events.

Other loves are wildly irrational; they're like being overwhelmed by an invisible wind. We look across a crowded room, catch the eye of a complete stranger, and, within moments or hours, we know we are as in love as we will ever be. We're not in love because we've had a long conversation with this person and gotten to know them; we haven't. We're not in love because we've shared key life events; we have not. We don't decide on this type of love. It decides on us.

With this love, every tiny detail, every evanescent nuance, silent moments when nothing is said, take on thunderous impact: her eyes move from the floor to his shoulder; her knees swing three inches toward his, his lips slightly part. Our hearts pound. We surrender to the full thrust of love, all of its physical and spiritual manifestations, and yet we know next to nothing concrete about the other person. Perhaps we never see that person again. Perhaps we exchange a few stolen kisses, or an afternoon of passion. Perhaps we connect forever; perhaps we say a heart-wrenching goodbye. "Mademoiselle Chambon" captures wordless, irrational love.

Jean (Vincent Lindon) is a rumpled, paunchy, middle-aged construction worker. He is married to Anne-Marie, a factory worker. They have one son, Jeremy. Anne-Marie is hurt on the job and can't pick up Jeremy from school. Jean must go. There he encounters Mademoiselle Veronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain) Jeremy's teacher. And Jean will never be the same.

Jean and Anne-Marie have a few other meetings. Not much is said. Not much happens. A passer-by, carefully observing their encounters, would have no idea that he or she was witnessing an event that neither Jean nor Veronique will ever forget.

Many "slow" movies bore me to tears. "Mademoiselle Chambon" is a "slow" movie and it never bored me. I came to understand that every line of dialogue, every apparently casual scene, is a minefield packed with meaning. In the opening scenes, Jean reveals his awkward inability to help his son with his homework. This prepares us for the story of an inarticulate construction worker who falls in love with a school teacher. The topic of his son's homework is the direct object – the object acted upon by the noun – or by fate. In a couple of scenes of Veronique's apartment, the viewer catches a glimpse of Bernini's statue of a helpless St. Teresa of Avila being pierced with an arrow of passion by a smiling cherub. St. Teresa is very much the direct object of that arrow, as are Jean and Veronique. Passion is beautiful and painful, life affirming and life threatening. Passion is both sexual and sacred. Jean is shown both tearing down, and putting up, walls. These walls are metaphorical as well as actual.

Three scenes in this movie are as definitive a treatment of their subject matter as any scene in any film. In one, a musician plays music with her back to her audience. Before she begins, she turns around with a luminous look of vulnerability. In another, two people listen to a piece of music. I won't describe the third scene to you, because I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but if you see the film, you'll know what I mean.

"Mademoiselle Chambon" is not perfect. It is under-produced, in Dogme-95 style. Actors don't wear make-up; there's no professional lighting to speak of. "Mademoiselle Chambon" would have worked better for me with higher production values.

I got to know Jean, but I was never sure of Veronique. I wanted to like her more than I did, to understand her very hard choices better, and to respect her choices more. Aure Atika is miscast. I never believed her as a factory worker, or as Jean's wife. And the ending struck me as incomplete and unsatisfying. I think the filmmaker wanted to make a movie that would ravish audiences emotionally. That he did. I wanted to have an intellectual understanding of how these events would play out in the future of the characters. I didn't get that from this movie, and I left it feeling that a sequel is necessary.

Finally, of course this film is like the classic David Lean film, "Brief Encounter" starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. I think that film gives the viewer more of a sense of the fullness of all the characters, and how the events shown during the film will play out in the characters' lives in the future. In short, to me, "Brief Encounter" felt more like a complete work of art.

In Stéphane Brizé's restrained fourth film (which he's adapted from a 1996 Éric Holder novel) a tight-lipped mason named Jean (Vincent Lindon) in an unnamed provincial French town meets his little boy's schoolteacher, the Mademoiselle of the title (Sandrine Kiberlain) and his world subtly changes. He loves his wife Anne-Marie (Aure Atika), who works in a print shop, and little Jérémy (Arthur Le Houerou), but Mademoiselle (her name is Véronique, but Jean never gets beyond the formal "vous" with her) has a refinement, a delicacy. And she plays the violin -- classical music that Jean seems unfamiliar with but delighted by.

At first Mademoiselle asks Jean at the last minute to fill in and speak to her class (and his son's) about his work, an experience that also gives him great pleasure. Perhaps he enjoys indirectly telling this refined maiden lady who attracts him about his basic, satisfying work, building houses that are always different and will last, as one child asks, "for your whole life." Then when she asks help with a broken window at her flat, he takes a look and then insists on being the one to replace it. Then comes the music. He insists that she play; photos and the violin tell him of her former profession.

This film has only a hint of sex, and no raw physicality, but it works with the body, with silence, and with gesture. Throughout it shows Lindon acting the part by doing hard construction work on screen, breaking up paving with a pneumatic drill, mounting the window, laying bricks of a wall, and so on. He even walks like a skilled laborer. Anne-Marie is always ironing, cooking, shopping, making lists. Mademoiselle Chambon reads, rests, places her hand delicately on her neck. Jean tenderly washes the feet of his old father (charming veteran Jean-Marc Thibault).

Finally the teacher plays a recording of chamber music at her place for Jean and as they sit together listening they slowly hold hands, embrace, and cling together as if at home, but afraid to go further. This carefully paced sequence is one of the film's most effective. However many "make-out" scenes you may have seen, this one still feels fresh. Lindon is like a fine mason in his acting, slowly, patiently laying the bricks of gesture. A silence and a pause can speak volumes.

Both Véronique and Jean fight their attraction. And can it go anywhere? But it keeps growing, despite gestures in the opposite direction. Jean tells Mademoiselle that her CD's interest him even though he hasn't listened to them yet. She usually changes schools every year, but tells him, in a key scene, that she's been asked to fill in for someone and stay on. But instead of expressing enthusiasm, Jean blurts out that his wife is pregnant.

This is one anchor to the family: one child, and another coming. Another is Jean's father. Jean and Anne-Marie are planning a big birthday party for the old man at their house with family members coming from all over. Family matters. But Jean shows how far his feelings have gone in another direction -- even though we've seen only those restrained moments -- when he invites Mademoiselle Chambon to come and play the violin for his father. It's not certain that his wife has suspected anything, but she has noticed that Jean seems bored, indifferent, irritable. And she might suspect why now.

What follows is surprising -- agonizingly suspenseful -- and quite familiar. We've seen this kind of story before. We've seen these characters before. But we've rarely seen more delicacy than Bizé brings to his treatment of the story, which is haunting in a classic way without feeling in any way retro -- though perhaps the provincial setting was chosen to avoid that, to have events unfold in a place that's less aggressively modern and hip than Paris.

Lindon and Kiberlain are husband and wife, though now estranged, which may help explain the magnetic energy in their scenes together. There are plenty of lines here, but there's a distrust of language, together with a touching desire to use it properly. "I'd like to hear more tunes," Jean tells Véronique. "Is that right, to say 'tunes'?." At the outset, Jérémy poses a homework problem to his parents to find the "direct object" in a sentence and they haven't a clue, but patiently figure out what this means. Bizé is great with the children. Arthur Le Houerou as the son is unfailingly alive and natural; and his classmates are spontaneous and charming (though primed, as classes are) when they excitedly ask Jean about his work.

If there is a weakness to the film it's the danger that the differences of class and culture are pelled out a little too clearly. Lindon is a magnificent actor, but as a man with many illustrious relatives and one-time suitor of Princess Caroline of Monaco he is not exactly drawing on personal experience in playing a mason whose father was also a mason. Nonetheless he is for the most part utterly convincing. It's the film itself that plays on broad differences that a screenplay of 90 minutes duration cannot quite adequately delineate. Lindon has a harried, careworn, but solid quality that fits a working man in need of reawakening. Kiberlain seems held inward, decent but tragically needy. You wouldn't know that she's been around the block with the actual Lindon and had a child by him; she could be this uptight maiden lady on the brink of lifelong spinsterhood. There's a sadness about her, a sweet sadness.

Opened in mid-October 2009 in Paris, this film is part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center for 2010. What a contrast with the mad body-presses and adulterous whirlwind of another film in the series, Cédric Kahn's Regret. When it comes to the varieties of love, the French have the bases covered.

MADEMOISELLE CHAMBON is a delicate, quiet interlude in the life of a construction worker in a little village whose gentle life is momentarily disrupted by the awakening of feelings of infatuation and the aftermath. Based on the novel by Eric Holder and adapted for the screen by Florence Vignon and director Stéphane Brizé, this little miracle of a movie is what the French do best - understated appreciation for passing passion in a world of ordinary days.

Jean (Vincent Lindon) is a construction worker happily married to Anne-Marie (Aure Atika) and adoring father of young son Jérémy (Arthur Le Houérou) and loving son of his retired builder father (Jean-Marc Thibault): he spends his hours away from his work tutoring his son with his wife and bathing his father's feet. Jérémy's new schoolteacher is the very reserved but kind Véronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain, in life the wife of Vincent Lindon!) who requests that Jean speak to her class about his occupation as a builder - an assignment Jean is flattered to accept. The presentation goes well and Véronique hesitantly asks Jean to repair a window in her home. Jean accepts the job (Anne-Marie thinks it is such a kind gesture that she asks Jean to invite Véronique to lunch). Jean replaces the window for the quietly reserved and anxious Véronique, and afterward Jean, noticing that Véronique plays the violin, requests she play for him a 'tune'. It is obvious that the peripatetic teacher is lonely, and it is also obvious that Jean is struck by the fact that a woman of education and musical talent would pay attention to a simple construction worker. In a weak moment the two exchange a kiss and that kiss alters the manner in which each of these two gentle people react to life. The results of this chance encounter play out in the conclusion of the story, a story so tender and yet so grounded in the realities of life that it takes the viewer by the heart and doesn't let go.

The many varying moments of intimacy, whether those moments are between Jean and his son, Jean and his father, Jean and his wife, and Jean with Mademoiselle Chambon, are photographed like paintings by cinematographer Antoine Héberlé. The entire cast is excellent and the performances by the five leading actors are superb. The musical score consists of original music by Ange Ghinozzi with a generous sampling of music by Sir Edward Elgar and others. This frail bouquet of a film appreciates silence, the unspoken word, and the natural emotions of ordinary people living ordinary lives. It is a multifaceted treasure.

Grady Harp

The Twilight series specializes in teen longing, hours of vampires, were-wolves, and civilians longing for each other without much in the way of sex. That is dull viewing. But the French seem to get matters of the heart right, as in the full length film about longing, Mademoiselle Chambon.

Jean (Vincent Lindon) is a builder with an adorable boy and loving wife. Figuratively he has built a satisfying life, yet the opening shot is of tearing down, specifically a floor but contextually his life. Into this life comes his son's attractive teacher, Veronique Chambon, all violin playing and the sweetest disposition this side of the Virgin Mary. When he fixes her window, he also begins building a relationship hanging around the edges of adultery.

The longing comes from multiple shots with no dialogue, typically European, and specifically French, because there is an artistic joy in the languid shots. The actors express their sweet frustration with small movements of their eyes and mouths, and the camera stays with them for many seconds longer than the longest American takes.

The climax comes when Jean's pregnant wife sees Veronique play violin at his father's birthday and sees Jean's very sympathetic response. The final act has the most action, and that's not much, and not necessarily what you expected. However, it's done with the greatest subtlety as the tortured Jean makes his choices and the patient Veronique sheds just a few tears, but meaningful ones, so underplayed is her part.

It's all quiet and slow, just like most of our lives. Director Stephane Brize's love of this love affair and gentle Jean's attachment to his family is apparent from the opening sequence with the family figuring out what a "direct object" is to the low-key final trip to the train station.

Like Citizen Kane's Bernstein longing for the girl with the parasol, Jean will probably never be the same having experienced the tyranny of lyrical love, adulterous or not: Mademoiselle Chambon.