Along Came Love

1947. Madeleine is a waitress in a hotel restaurant. She has a small son and everyone in the town knows who his father is; she was with a German soldier during the occupation and is still paying for it. François is the son of a wealthy family and studies literature. The two meet. François asks her to marry him and takes the child as his own. His family objects. Years pass; they move, they build a new life. But François is hiding something too, and his is also something that could not be said at the time. Katell Quillévéré directs; she wrote the screenplay with Gilles Taurand. Anaïs Demoustier plays Madeleine and Vincent Lacoste plays François. It is a French production. The film screened in the Cannes Première section at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and reached French cinemas on 29 November 2023. It won the grand prize at the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival, where Vincent Lacoste was named best actor. Its starting point is the director's own family history; her grandmother had a relationship with a German soldier during the occupation and the man she married four years later adopted the child. The matter it treats is moral pressure in postwar France; both characters live with a secret of their own. The narrative spreads over thirty years and makes abrupt jumps between periods. The film builds the relationship not as a love story but as an arrangement, and that arrangement changes over time. Its limit is structure; the leaps in time break the narrative and some periods stay superficial. Who it is for: viewers who like French period drama and narratives of hidden lives. Who it is not for: it is long, in pieces, and the ending bitter.