Leaving
Directed by Catherine Corsini
France, 2009
Cornerhouse, 18 July 2010
Still from Leaving
A film that could almost be described as a bourgeois version of I am Love.
As in that film, love appears as a thunderbolt. It is unsought for, unwelcome and unwanted, and not entirely a good thing. Kristin Scott Thomas gives a spellbinding turn as Suzanne, an apparently content wife whose life is turned suddenly upside down. She deserts her husband and children, relinquishing a comfortable and affluent lifestyle, in order to be with an ex-con. Her new life is, in so many different ways, an impoverishment of her old – and the path towards it is messy, disruptive, humiliating and painful.
In a curious kind of a way, this is a religious and even a pagan film. Love is a divine madness, unworldly in its disregard of law, morality and raw economic power. Yet love, too, is a power in the world: it effects behaviour, changes people, makes things happen for good or ill.
Leaving is a fine film.
