La Séparation

Pierre and Anne are sitting in a cinema; he reaches for her hand and she pulls it away. The film starts from that small movement and widens out from it forwards rather than back. They have a child, they have a home, they still speak to each other politely; but the distance between them grows a little every day and neither can name a reason for it. Christian Vincent shows a separation not as a scene of shouting but as a drift. There is no infidelity and no guilty party; one of them has simply gone, and the other notices too late. Daniel Auteuil is a man with no defences against something he does not understand; Isabelle Huppert refuses at every point to take on the obligation to explain. Karin Viard belongs to the life going on around them.