Suite Franҫaise

The scene: the village of Bussy in northern France during the French occupation. The year: 1940. As the film opens, we meet the haughty Madame Angellier (played by Kristin Scott Thomas), controlling mother-in-law of the female lead Lucille, waiting in her grand chateau for news of son Gaston, reported to be in a POW camp in Germany. Parisian refugees are pouring into the village, followed by Nazi troops, and one day a German officer, Bruno von Falk (Matthias Schoenaerts), arrives at the chateau. He is to be billeted with the women. Though strictly forbidden even to speak to Falk, Lucille is soon drawn to a man who appears cultured, a fine pianist and composer of the hauntingly beautiful Suite Franҫaise of the title. Gradually a relationship starts and he tells her more about his family. Two of his three brothers are already dead in the war. Once Lucille discovers letters in Falk’s office revealing that her husband had been having an affair for years and even had a daughter, any last reservations she has about pursuing this dangerous new relationship are forgotten and their (at first) clandestine affair continues in earnest.

Intertwined with the main ‘romance’ is an important sub-plot involving Madeleine and her husband Benoit. Unable to fight because of an accident, Benoit is reduced to making feeble gestures like stealing the Germans’ uniforms while they swim. The couple are routinely humiliated by Bonnet, the German billeted on their farm. Events then take an even darker turn when Benoit is caught pilfering by the Viscomte’s wife – an excellent cameo performance by Harriet Walter. She tells her husband that Benoit tried to shoot her (a fabrication). Nazi soldiers come to arrest him but he manages to escape having first shot an officer. Retaliation comes with the arrest of the Viscomte, who is to be executed if Benoit is not found within 48 hours. Madame Angellier meanwhile is complicit in hiding Benoit in the chateau. The Viscomte is duly executed at the hands of a sickened Falk. Lucille agrees to help Benoit get to Paris to join the resistance. She goes to Falk for a travel pass, he agrees to issue one and Lucille and Benoit head for the checkpoint, unaware that a suspicious soldier has issued orders for the car to be searched on arrival. In a dramatic confrontation with said soldier, Benoit is shot and wounded but the pair manage to escape with the help of Falk who arrives on the scene at this point. This, we are told as the film comes to an end, was the last Lucille ever saw or heard of Falk. Bruno’s promise to meet her again one day “not as a soldier” was never to be.

Suite Franҫaise is more than just a love story and goes much further than most ‘sleeping with the enemy’ films of the past. As critic Emma Dibdin puts it: “Suite Française works far better as the story of a community in flux than it does as a brooding romance”. It deals with issues of collaboration, compassion and betrayal and presents us with a thought-provoking study of what happens when ordinary people are confronted with extraordinary events and faced with unfamiliar moral dilemmas. Many of the characters behave as you would expect: the rich (typified by the figure of the Viscomte) hoard their wealth and abuse their power, the poor (the likes of Benoit and Madeleine) live hand-to-mouth existences and the village’s young female population are excited by the arrival of handsome soldiers. But there are others among these ‘ordinary’ people who demonstrate incredible courage and compassion. A meek, obedient Lucille in the early part of the film develops into someone who finds the courage to shrug off her fellow villagers’ accusations of collaboration and risk all to save Benoit.

The film is beautifully shot (in Belgium, not France) and has many poignant scenes. It also boasts excellent performances by the main characters, especially Michelle Williams in the lead role. At first sight, the film looked as if it would be peopled by stock ‘war film’ types but as the story unfolds we get to see more of what the actors can do. Kristin Scott Thomas is, as always, excellent. Her icy demeanour in the first half of the film (“more terrifying than the Nazis”, according to the Telegraph’s Tim Robey) gradually peels away to reveal the anxious, grieving mother underneath. One critic has compared her performance to Miranda Richardson’s nuanced portrayal of Miss Lorimer in the recent Testament of Youth.

Written by Irène Némirovsky before her death in 1942 in Auschwitz, this was the second (and last) of a planned sequence of five books. Ironically, her elder daughter Denise kept the notebook containing the manuscript of Suite Française for fifty years without reading it, believing that it would be too painful to read. It was eventually published in France in 2004, and became an immediate bestseller. I can see why.

See the official trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cR0L6invGQ