The Forbidden Woman

François is thirty-nine, married, with a child. Muriel is twenty-two and lives alone. They meet by chance and the affair begins. The film tells that affair from beginning to end: the first eagerness, the hiding, the jealousy, the lying, and an arrangement in which the two sides are not equal. Nobody is deceiving anybody, and nobody is honest either. Philippe Harel directed the film and played François, but is hardly ever seen: the camera looks entirely through his eyes and the audience watches every scene from where he stands. The face opposite is always Isabelle Carré's. That choice makes the telling one-sided, and the film does not hide it; the woman's side of the affair is always seen from across the room.