This diverting French melodrama, spanning decades of postwar French life, begins with a promising meld of fact and fiction.
Archival footage shows us the sexual partners of now-repelled (or killed) German soldiers having their heads forcibly shaved before public shaming in the town square.
We then meet Madeleine (Anaïs Demoustier), shot in matching black and white, evading the mob, before the film, now in idealised colour, meets her again as a waitress in liberated Normandy. Her family have ostracised her. She is raising a son who believes his father to have died in the war. He may well have done for all Madeleine knows.
It is to director Katell Quillévéré’s credit that she does not fret overly on any guilt Madeleine may or may not have about fraternising with the enemy. That was then and this is now. Survival is all. As most anybody would, she focuses on living from difficult day to difficult day.
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Help comes in the form of a middle-class student named François (Vincent Lacoste). They fall in something like love and get married, but it soon becomes clear his sexual interests do not lie entirely – or even largely – with women. Fractious toing and froing takes us through France’s uncertain 1950s and up into its turbulent 1960s.
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The director does not connect much with wider politics. Anyone hoping for a social history of the times will be in for disappointment. This is the sort of film in which people happen upon news reports on the Vietnam War merely as way of clarifying which decade we have reached. Along Came Love is, rather, a saga of wavering emotional dynamics. The central encounter with a black GI really doesn’t work – not least because his dialogue has that flat, disconnected quality you so often get when characters speak English in a film not otherwise in that language.
Neither principal seems certain how much affection their character feels for the other in this necessarily compromised marriage. But the film does eventually find balance and power in later sections that confront the miseries into which different classes of ostracisation have forced both Madeleine and François.
Along Came Love (which has a deceptive title) does not torture the emotion or tax the brain, but, well acted and easy on the eye, it just about delivers on its early promise of knotty personal drama. It also has important things to say – implicitly for the most part – about the unjust expectations placed on women in French society.
In cinemas from Friday, May 30th
