Along Came Love review – l’amour, loss and lingering shame in eventful French relationship movie

Director Katell Quillévéré explores the ravages of romance in an intelligently performed period piece about a shamed mother and a closeted husbandThe title of Katell Quillévéré’s first movie, Un Poison Violent from 2010, was taken from Serge Gainsbourg’s song Un poison violent, c’est ça l’amour, and the awful toxicity of love is a theme that has run through her work ever since. It is an underground stream that has become very much an overground stream in this new, heartfelt movie. It’s robust and a little unsubtle, without the nuances and indirections that govern her best work, but handsomely produced and resoundingly performed, avowedly autobiographical and inspired by her grandmother. Quillévéré has said that her influences are Maurice Pialat for the tough realism and Douglas Sirk for the melodrama and the sense of buried shame. I wonder if there isn’t some David Lean in there for the final scene at the railway station.Madeleine is a young single mother played by Anaïs Demoustier; working as a waitress on the Brittany coast just after the second world war, in a uniform requiring her hair to be tied up in a ridiculous white bow, she has a difficult five-year-old son, Daniel. She meets a shy, sweet, bespectacled young man, François Delambre (a performance as sturdily intelligent as Demoustier’s from Vincent Lacoste), who is a postgraduate student in Paris, and from a wealthy local family, self-conscious about a limp caused by childhood polio. Continue reading...

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