Mademoiselle Chambon

This movie is deliciously silent, bursting with tension at every take. Against the backdrop of parochial France, two apparently incongruous beings find respite in each other in spite of an excruciating difficulty: schoolteacher v parent. Amidst the trial and tribulations, however, two souls delight in a certain serenity, calling into question our feelings about relationships which cross boundaries.

The father of a primary school boy meets and warms to his son's teacher, Mademoiselle Chambon. She is delicate, warm but uncertain of her future. A tender, insightful look into the nature of human relations.

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.

A measure of just how well recent French film Mademoiselle Chambon is constructed lies in a very small, although very subtle, moment between the two leads: one a married man and the other a single woman, which they share in one of the rooms in the home of that of the single woman's. He has voluntarily come round to check what she thinks is a draughty window frame, the gentleman deducing that it is indeed faulty; but as they stand over it and speak, director Stéphane Brizé places the camera in an adjacent room and shoots the interaction via a mid-shot of nothing in particular – we hang back from the specifics the two characters speak of: we know it isn't important, and the long take combining with the static camera as the chemistry the two have shared in other locales up to this point allows us to reach our own conclusions as to the dangerous places this bond is heading.

The film, a romance about characters we sense could really exist and would genuinely both do and say the things that transpire within, is a really rewarding minimalist piece working with the material at its own pace and bringing to life this tale that these two people share in its own way. At no point do we feel cheated, short-changed nor in the hands of any one who is doing any less than their utmost to tell a taut and engaging story about people at crossroads in their lives.

Set in an unspecified French town, the locale essentially doubling up as any town or city anywhere in the world, we cover Vincent Lindon's Jean and his love interest, the titular "Mademoiselle" Véronique Chambon, played by Sandrine Kiberlain. Jean is a builder, a scene on a site upon which he digs up tiled floors and generally demolishes a property so that the new inhabitants may reshape and rearrange it at their pleasure symptomatic with how he, as a man, will come to have his own feelings and emotions dismantled and reconstructed. His domestic set up sees him live with his wife Anne-Marie (Aure Atika) and their infant son Jérémy, their first scene together seeing the three of them attempt to decipher Jérémy's grammar homework and not appear to fully function as a family unit as they struggle to correctly deduce which parts of a certain sentence is the part Jérémy needs to reiterate is of a certain grammatical ilk.

The opening works on two levels, first and foremost as a sequence reiterating that there is room for this family unit of three to disagree and it goes a long way to get across the sense that there is this room for the three of them to fail to read off the same page – later on, things will become more heated as Jean goes through his wringer of emotion. Away from that, the scene additionally acts as a wonderful opener in its designs to wake the audience up; to ask them to perhaps join in with the grammatical problem proposed; to work it out for themselves – to get the mind working during this brief prelude to what is a riveting and intelligent character piece requiring such an attentive attitude. The boy speaks of how his teacher stood at the front of the class and spoke about what needs to be done in order to solve these problems; the sentiment being that his teacher wouldn't have the trouble in solving what everyone else is struggling over. It is this teacher, Kiberlain's aforementioned Véronique, with whom Jean will come to interact before later loving.

Guest lecturing at Jérémy's school in Véronique's class leads on to the visiting of her at home and the said repairing of her window, furthermore leading onto Jean requesting to hear her play the violin she owns. That last instance of Véronique plucking up enough courage to play in front of another human being for the first time in a while encapsulates the superb acting throughout, Brizé's insistence on a static camera shot from medium distances allowing us to fully appreciate just how well Kiberlain does as she sits there and wrestles with the proposal of playing for someone she's known only for about a week. One finds it difficult to recommend the film enough; it is so much more than a film fan's wet dream of static camera angles, extended takes and the French language, a burning and wholly engaging realist drama which ought to take its spot at the top of the tree regarding the best films of recent years.

This is a slow film, and I find certain takes to be unnecessarily long. For example, the opening scene with Jean, the male lead, noisily working with his jackhammer can be shortened with no impact to the story telling.

However, this will be all the fault-finding I can do. The acting from the three lead actors is great and the music, though sparse, is appropriate. Jean is a quiet, responsible blue collar worker who takes care of this wife and son, and shows great love for his ageing father whose feet he often washed with care and tenderness. He is a simple person and a good human being. In fact, there are no bad characters in this film. What it is about are choices in life, and there are no right or wrong choices here.

When fate brought Jean to his son's teacher, Veronique, who gives him a taste of another world he had no previous exposure to, he was enchanted. And this enchantment transforms itself to a fierce love for her which is all consuming. Jean is shy, and looks down to the ground most of the time. So moments of intimacy are subtle and subdued. But you can feels the intensity of Jean's feeling and what it does to his mind.

In the end he has to make a choice: the love of his life or his responsibility to his wife, son, and ageing father, all of which he care about. No easy and simple decision here. And it will be difficult to predict what we will do when we are in his position, knowing that either way there will be no happy ending for all.

But, hey, such is life. One can argue the very confrontation of this choice makes life worth living. This is simply a great romance story of very real, ordinary people told without fanfare. A great French cinema experience in my opinion.

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.