Un Amour Impossible

The possibility of a movie

Film. Catherine Corsini adapts Un Amour Impossible of Christine Angot. From an intimate novel she makes a fresco about France from the 50s and 60s.

By Jacques Braustein

Châteauroux, late 50s, Rachel Schwartz, 26-year-old social worker is from the middle class. She lives with her mother when she meets Philippe, a Parisian of good family and translator for the army. Cultivated, he makes him discover Nietzsche and the authors in vogue, they fall in love. Rachel places the young man on a pedestal, but Philippe is not as involved as she is in the relationship, his Jewish ancestry slows him down. Rachel gets pregnant, and Philippe walks away slowly. “I will never marry you. Of course, if you had been rich it would have been different. You are pregnant but that does not change anything.” Begins an epistolary relationship that will last for years. Rachel is fighting for her daughter, Chantal, to be named Philippe. Blinded by the father-daughter relationship she tries to create and maintain, she totally misses out on her perverse nature. The Inceste that will nourish the work of Christine Angot author of the book from which is drawn Un amour impossible.

Catherine Corsini perfectly appropriates the novel to treat themes that are dear to her

Catherine Corsini appropriates this novel to perfection, to deal with themes that are dear to her. The place of women (here in the France of the thirty glorious), the social rise of her heroine, her condition of single mother. Philippe will eventually marry a German, and is justified as follows : “the Germans are devoted to their men like the Japaneses”. He still makes Rachel believe that she touches the goal for each time escape and return to its modest origins.

From this 220-page autobiographical story, Catherine Corsini manages to make an ample film. 50 years of history, 90 places recreated identically (like the former primary health insurance fund of the department of Indre), an epistolary form…

Virginie Efira, star of comedy (It Boy, In bed with Victoria…) who broadens her palette for each role (the next Paul Vehroven: Benedetta) wears the film. As for Niels Schneider (Un Peuple et son Roi, Ad Vitam…), it is formidable of seduction and duplicity. A great movie about the relationship mother, daughter. A mother who did not know how to protect her child. A girl who admires her and finds the strength to remain benevolent through writing. “You’re a good mom. What’s the difference ? it changes everything ! “.

VOIR AUSSI