Watch Leaving For Free

You won't be disappointed!

To me, this movie is perfection.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Dazzled by her performance in the ultra-stylish Thriller Love Crime,I decided to keep a look out for other films starring Kristin Scott Thomas (KST!) Taking a look at BBC iPlayer,I was thrilled to spot a Thomas film about to be taken from the site,which led to me leaving for a viewing.The plot:Despite having the "perfect" bourgeois lifestyle, Suzanne finds herself to be emotionally unfulfilled. Getting her husband Samuel to put a room in his office, Suzanne begins showing round for a builder. Crossing paths with former prisoner Ivan,Suzanne is taken by his rugged looks and begins to have an affair with Ivan. Pushed to confess the affair to Samuel,Suzanne finds herself having to decide if she wants to stay with Ivan or stay with her bourgeois lifestyle.View on the film:Presenting a stripped-down affair,co-writer/(along with Gaëlle Macé/Antoine Jaccoud & Emmanuelle Bernheim) director Catherine Corsini and cinematographer Agnès Godard stab the violent passion Suzanne and Ivan have for each other with razor-sharp editing giving the sex scenes a heated atmosphere. Placing Suzanne's against an unfulfilled backdrop, Corsini completely drains the film of colour,with the washed out, bleached appearance reflecting Suzanne's feelings.Despite the "rich housewife falls for builder" sounding like the outline of an "Adult" movie,the screenplay by Corsini/Macé/Jaccoud and Bernheim break the hollow bourgeois with an earthy Drama of Suzanne and Ivan try in desperation to hold onto their blue-collar threads,as Samuel turns the screws on Suzanne for rejecting the bourgeois lifestyle. Joined by a humble Sergi López as Ivan and a greasy Samuel, Kristin Scott Thomas gives an impeccable performance as Suzanne,by Thomas getting under the brittle nails on Suzanne discovering what matters to her when her bourgeois gifts leave.

I was most interested to find out that the female star of Four Weddings and a Funeral speaks fluent French, and has starred in a few films made in France, this was one I had heard about and looked forward to trying. Basically Suzanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) is a wealthy married woman and mother of two living in the south of France, but her empty bourgeois lifestyle is beginning to depress her, so she returns to working as a physiotherapist. Her doctor husband Samuel (The Interpreter's Yvan Attal) agrees to help Suzanne any way he can, but then she meets Ivan (Pan's Labyrinth's Sergi López), a Spanish ex-con hired to do the building for her new consulting room in the backyard, Suzanne and Ivan are mutually and passionately attracted to each other. After multiple sexual meetings with each other, Suzanne confesses her affair with Ivan to her husband, and promises to give it up, but she cannot actually do it, and finally decides to give up everything to live with Ivan and continue her passion to the fullest. But Samuel will not let go of her, and her daughter reject her, but her son stays connected to her, Suzanne and Ivan find themselves in financial trouble, when her credit card is stopped, she is forced to sell her expensive watch to get money. When their situation gets worse, Suzanne and Ivan resort to extreme measures, stealing paintings and valuables from Samuel's house, only for Ivan to get arrested, and Suzanne tries to convince her husband she was solely responsible for the burglary, only taking what was hers. Suzanne says she will do anything if Ivan is kept out of jail, Samuel tells her if she comes home he will be let free, she agrees to do so, but she is distant with her family, and has to put up with her husband making sexual advances. In the end Suzanne grabs the rifle and shells from the closet and kills Samuel dead in his sleep, she is reunited with Ivan at the ruined house they planned to renovate, they embrace and she sobs hysterically, in the distance a police siren is heard approaching. Also starring Bernard Blancan as Rémi, Aladin Reibel as Dubreuil, Alexandre Vidal as David, Daisy Broom as Marion and Berta Esquirol as Berta. Scott gives a magnetic performance as the bored housewife risking and leaving everything for sexual lust, López as the Spanish handyman and Attal as the unpleasant husband do their parts well also, it is a nice simple story about an affair, with blackmailing and revenge along the way, it may be slightly predictable, but it has terrific camera-work and music, and you certainly want to know how it all plays out, a credible romantic melodrama. Worth watching!

Making movies about affairs is a tricky business. While they may be a matter of life and death to those involved they are spectacularly boring to the outside observer. They make no sense, defy all logic and seem the ultimate in selfishness, self-delusion and self-destruction. We acknowledge they exist but they are not a pretty sight. For these reasons it is difficult for an audience to become involved with the protagonists of the affair. You observe them in all their madness rather than root for them, more a technical exercise than an emotional one. So it is with this movie, it is done as well as it possibly could be but for all that we look at the events unfolding as they surely must into disaster, watch the credits roll, and walk away from it as if we had just watched a documentary. It might help if we actually knew and cared about one or both of the protagonists before it all started. It might help even more if one or both of them were likable. Kristen Scott Thomas may be a good actress but she does not "do" warm, or perhaps she has just not landed roles that show this side of here. Whatever the reason she is not a likable person here, which may well be what was intended. Although the guy is very much the secondary character in the portrayal of the relationship he does at least bring a modicum of humanity and warmth to his role. He seems to have unwittingly awakened a monster in his mate that he is doing his best to control, and he seems like a nice, uncomplicated sort of guy. He is in over his head trying to control KST and it's hard not to sympathize with him a little. The endorsement on the cover of the DVD says it is a "magnificent love story". We see these two rutting and heaving and panting but the effect is not beautiful, or sexy or passionate, quite the contrary, all you want to do is look away in embarrassment. While we might understand on a technical level that there is some sort of love involved it is something we can't understand and can't get share in so ultimately all we see is a lot of lust. It is anything but "magnificent", it has little or nothing to do with "love" and I'm not even sure it is a "story" - it is just what inevitably happens in this particular situation. OK, the shooting is a little unusual but that is so tacked on, illogical and irrelevant it is hard to know what to make of it. Aside from that, unlike other reviewers I have no problem with the "authenticity" of the situation, let's face it, love of this nature is a form of temporary insanity, and to try and analyze it terms of logic is a futile exercise.So...in summary, a serviceable, well produced depiction of what amounts to a cautionary tale involving characters that aren't particularly likable. You will probably watch to the end, you will probably not hate it, but you may not be a better, wiser or more entertained person because of it.

Catherine Corsini's drama about infidelity and its consequences follows hot on the heels of Mademoiselle Chambon and I Am Love, two other recent similarly themed dramas from Europe.Kristin Scott Thomas (from I've Loved You So Long, etc) plays Suzanne, a happily married forty-something mother of two adolescent children. Her husband Samuel (played by noted Israeli actor/ director Yvan Attal) is a successful surgeon, well off, respected and politically well connected. When Suzanne decides that she wants to return to work as a physiotherapist after having spent the past fifteen years raising her two children, Samuel is supportive and decides to redevelop the garage into an office and clinic for her. He hires family friend Remi (Bernard Blancan) to oversee the construction work. But Remi is busy and subcontracts the job to Ivan (Sergi Lopez, best remembered as the villain of Pan's Labyrinth). Suzanne finds herself attracted to the swarthy, sweaty Spaniard, and begins a torrid affair with him. She announces that she plans to leave her family to live with Ivan, a decision that tears apart the once loving and close-knit family, and has tragic consequences. Scott Thomas' terrific performance as the passionate Suzanne, who has grown bored with her comfortable life, drives this French drama. Her facial expressions brilliantly and silently convey a gamut of expressions, from joy, happiness, ecstasy, to guilt, determination and doubt, and we can almost see what she's thinking. And her ability to speak French perfectly is tremendous. Attal (from Rush Hour 3, Munich, etc) is also good as Samuel; initially he seems a sympathetic character, but he quickly reveals himself capable of extreme cruelty in the face of Suzanne's betrayal. Lopez is also very good. Although Leaving shares a number of thematic similarities with the recent I Am Love, it is a better film. It is more engaging and emotionally satisfying than that pretentious, self-consciously arty and ultimately dull drama. Gaelle Mace's script is sparse, stripped back to the essentials, and Corsini's direction is suitably economical. There's not a wasted moment, or hint of flab or unnecessary padding in its brief but intense 85 minutes.