An Impossible Love

The plot is overloaded with all sorts of personal, psychological, familial malfunctions. It ends up tiring you rather than entertain or make one think. The development of the characters is a bit predictable even though they have many different hardships to undergo. The acting is excellent without an exception and the aesthetics of the film is brilliant. I'd say it's like a crush test for yourself to see how you'll react and what you think intuitively about all that's going on.

Sometimes things are not as we think. This movie is an example of that. What starts with a very ordinary story develops into an adventure of drama. We have seen the story, the beginning of the film many, many times before; boy meets girl, they fall in love, but can not marry due to class differences. But this issue is only used as a starting point in this gripping, well-played and engaging film. The film depicts people, main characters in an era, and masterfully manages to follow developments. For my own part, it was also demanding to watch, first and foremost to understand why Rachel played by Virginie Efira makes the choices she makes in the film. This is how good film should be like. Challenge us and give us insight into choices others choose to make. I now understand that I have to check out the other films director Catherine Corsini has made. At least she has succeeded greatly in this wonderful film.

I did not seek out this film.

Watched it one Sunday afternoon on BBC iPlayer.

I was feeling unwell and thought it looked gentle enough. There was no write up, so did not know what to expect.

It was a fine, intelligent film; Rachel was a wonderful character, I liked and understood her. It is this factor that sustains the film throughout. The two hours or so passed quickly; one becomes heavily invested in the central character.

One is left with no doubt about Phillippe from the start, he is not ordinary and totally narcissistic. Therein lies the reason for, what sometimes seems like, his unfathomable hold over Rachel. This is not about class differences or anything as mundane as that keeping lovers apart, this is about a true narcissist's manipulation of a trusting and loving girl / woman.

When adult Chantel, Rachel and Philippe's daughter, confronts Rachel at the end, Rachel's answer is believable; she simply did not conceive that the problems in their mother and daughter relationship, during Chantel's teenage years, was anything other than that she, Rachel, was simply not good enough.

I am trying not to give anything away, just watch the film and see it play out. Just remember that it is Rachel's life you are watching unfolding.

Very good performances and superb period atmosphere in this absorbing story of the relationship between a woman and a man who sees the relationship very differently to her perception. Bravely extends the story over a long period, over thirty years, and does so convincingly.

Sometimes I think it is only France that is producing one incredible film after another. I have a list of the great films that I have seen from this country ( the ones that I believe will last and be returned to as great works of art ) and this joins them. I watched it late at night and I could not sleep such was the impact. To tell its story is to do it a disservice. It is the story of a life, and the people in that life; it questions and it probes, and it shows how far we all are from knowing those who affect us during this short span of living that we have. Many philosophical questions are asked, and the scene at the end of the film between Virginie Efira and Jehnny Beth is so precise, so clear that my head was spinning with its truth and sometimes dreadful clarity. Society and us as individuals are pitilessly drawn into question, but all this would mean nothing without the direction of Catherine Corsini and the group of actors she has brought togethet. Efira is superb, and Jehnny Beth has a fierce force in her acting that I found overwhelming. I have admired Niels Schneider for quite a while, but here he surpasses himself. I am a poet myself, and one fine writer said about one of my poems that it was above criticism. So is this film. Like that elusive thing that we call truth it shifts and it changes, and perhaps truth in its essence is beyond us all, both in its certitude and its horror and its beauty. ' Un Amour Impossible ' cuts into the heart and the brain like a scalpel.