Diary of a Fleeting Affair

A divorced woman and a married man meet and agree the terms in advance: this will go nowhere, neither will expect anything of the other, and feelings will not be discussed. They keep meeting for the next year and a half. The film follows those meetings in sequence, as conversations. Emmanuel Mouret directs. Sandrine Kiberlain plays the woman and Vincent Macaigne the man. The form rests on one rule: every scene is a meeting and every meeting is a conversation. The bedroom is barely shown. What is described is not the affair but how the affair is described. Both of them keep restating their own terms, and as the restatements go on it becomes clear the terms are not holding. Mouret's cinema comes out of the Rohmer tradition and this is one of its plainest instances: no voiceover, sparse music, a calm camera, and all the weight in the dialogue. Kiberlain and Macaigne carry it. Both suppress the feeling, and you understand what is happening from what is not said. It screened in the Cannes Premiere section in 2022. Who it is for: viewers who like French cinema built on talk and the Rohmer tradition. Who it is not for: nothing happens and the film is entirely speech, and the same argument recurs several times.