Trama

A Jewish refugee marries a soldier to escape deportation to Germany. Meanwhile a wealthy art student loses her first husband to a stray Resistance bullet; at the Liberation she meets an actor, gets pregnant, and marries him.

In 1942 in occupied France, a Jewish refugee marries a soldier to escape deportation to Germany. Meanwhile a wealthy art student loses her first husband to a stray Resistance bullet; at the Liberation she meets an actor, gets pregnant, and marries him. Lena and Madeleine meet at their children's school in Lyon in 1952 and the intensity of their relationship strains both their marriages to the breaking point.—English Showalter <showalte@crab.rutgers.edu>

1952 Lyons. During the war in 1942, Belgian Lena entered into what was for her a marriage of convenience to Michel - then in the Foreign Legion, now a garage owner - who was in turn attracted to her without even knowing her. While Michel ended up not being quite who she thought he was as a man or husband, Lena, who arguably has never loved him, has developed an affection for him, especially as he took great care in looking after her during the war, tenuous for both of them being Jewish. Madeleine, an artist, is on her second marriage to actor Costa, who is always working on some fast money scheme which either doesn't get off the ground or backfires on him. While Madeleine married him at the end of the war because he was "fun", she arguably married her first husband for love, he who was accidentally killed in crossfire between the Nazis and resistance fighters. The two couples meet at an event at the school that both sets of their respective children attend, Lena and Michel with two daughters, Florence and Sophie, and Madeleine and Costa with a son, René. While there is a rather stiff relationship that forms between various individuals, it is the relationship between Lena and Madeleine that forms the core of the foursome in each woman providing that emotional need missing from the other's marriage. It is specifically Michel who may have some issue in what he sees as the two women's inappropriate friendship and in the process Lena not living up to her wifely duties.—Huggo