The Accompanist

In Nazi occupied Paris the young pianist Sophie Vasseur is hired to accompany the well known singer Irene Brice. Irene’s husband Charles, a businessman doing work with the Germans, wrestles with his own conscience. In time Sophie fixes on Irene and attaches herself as a maid as well as an accompanist. Rather than living her own life she lives Irene’s triumphs and affairs at second hand. The film tells the occupation not through large events but through a relation of dependence inside one household. The question of who is complicit in what reaches all the way into the music room. Difference of class, admiration and complicity all sit inside the same relation. Romane Bohringer, Richard Bohringer and Elena Safonova appear in Claude Miller’s hundred and two minute French film, completed in 1992.