Mr & Mme Adelman

A French film that tells forty-five years of a marriage. The famous writer Victor Adelman dies. After the funeral a journalist talks to his widow Sarah, and she begins telling the story from the beginning. It starts in the 1970s. The two meet in a bar; Victor is a writer nobody reads at the time and Sarah comes from a wealthy family and is studying literature. The years that follow open in order: the first book refused, the second a success, then money, prizes, affairs, separations and returns. Each decade has its own costumes, its own hair and its own way of speaking. The question at the centre is who built that career. Sarah describes the part she played in the writing of each book, and the size of that part changes as the narrative goes on. The reliability of the narrator becomes the film's own subject; Sarah is constructing something inside the story she is telling. Nicolas Bedos plays Victor and Doria Tillier plays Sarah. Denis Podalydès and Christiane Millet are in the cast. Nicolas Bedos directed; it is his first film as director. The ageing make-up and the transitions between periods are the hardest thing about it technically. An interesting production for anyone who likes relationship drama and games with narration. For a viewer expecting a straight love story, the film keeps turning back and changing what it said.