Partir [Leaving] (2009)

80%

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Disturbing look at middle-class ennui and its often tragic circumstances. Here, the wife of an unmanly bourgeois goes off with the handyman not so much to find herself as a woman as to get away from her dull married existence. That she finds love for the first time in her life there can be no doubt, but her reckless middle-aged pursuit of it calls her sanity into question at the same time as you admire her for the consistency of that pursuit.

This torrid melodrama features that force of nature Kristin Scott THOMAS who makes the whole thing compelling and worthwhile. The male characters are a bit thin and archetypal but this is a film from a woman's perspective and so this problem can be somewhat overlooked.

What really makes this film scary is that the White bourgeoisie are so emotionally-repressed in their desire to seem more worthwhile as humans than the poor that they can effectively forget to grow up, so rabid is the social snobbery that it eventually becomes a substitute for maturity. This desire on the wife's part for a bit of rough is really a desire for genuine human contact denied her by her middle-class husband and by her own hang-ups. This is particularly telling in the sex scenes where one feels the wife is experiencing her body fully for the first time in her life. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the bourgeois are so violent in their desire to judge others by birth circumstances since they then do not have to judge or see themselves as they really are - missing a vital human part. The anger, childishness and frustration here makes you wonder if the affluent could ever be trusted as childminders if you ever had them as neighbors

This is a marriage from which the wife cannot escape because the husband wants a show-business relationship to impress his friends, but which is emotionally empty. His desperate attempts to imprison his wife prove he has no love for her and so we are left wondering what the true basis for the relationship is. This explains the high rates of divorce and adultery in the West but offers no solution to it.

Like Diary of a Mad Housewife, this movie offers little hope of escape from the gilded cage that is Western culture - except, as here, crime. That we all need one moment of amour fou in our lives to help us to grow up is well made here and helps account for our enjoyment of this drama.

Copyright © 2010 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.