Leaving

Unfulfilled playing the part of a bourgeois housewife to her husband Samuel (Yvan Attal) and two children, Suzanne Vidal (Kristin Scott Thomas) decides to return to her old job as a physiotherapist. She enlists the help of penniless Spanish labourer Ivan (Serge Lopez) to clear out a derelict building where her new office will be. Somewhat predictably she is seduced by Ivan’s passionate nature in contrast to her spouse’s clinical arrogance, and she swiftly abandons her family to tragic consequences. Although no longer Samuel’s financial prisoner she now finds herself a slave to her own incapacity for rational thought, underlined when she pleads to Ivan, "Throw me out or I can’t go." Scott Thomas plays Suzanne with an involving and haunted desperation, preventing her from being just another Lady Chatterley falling for a bit of rough, but the film is hampered by touches of overt melodrama, so that in the end she has our sympathy, but not our full empathy. [Juliet Buchan]