Why is a movie about the aftermath of a Parisian career woman’s mental breakdown, set in a small town in eastern France, named after an area of the west coast of Ireland? Because in 1981 a French singer, Michel Sardou, had a massive hit with a song called “Les lacs du Connemara” (The Lakes of Connemara). It’s one of those cheesy overplayed songs like “Take Me Home, Country Roads” or “Sweet Home Alabama” that everyone somehow knows, making it popular at karaoke or when you’re bombed off your face at 2 am and the party’s still going. It is also, like those country classics, beloved by a certain kind of people, perhaps not the most sophisticated, perhaps not the most genteel. (The French friend who explained all this to me under promise of anonymity had a huge rant about the song locked and loaded.) But the title has been picked for a reason; the song’s importance to the aftermath of a Parisian career woman’s mental breakdown is some of the most realistic use of music to soundtrack a life decision that’s ever been made. Connemara itself takes a little time to get going, but the strength of its ending is completely worth the wait.
Hélène (a superb Mélanie Thierry) is an efficiency expert, one of those unflappable professionals in pencil skirts who can optimise anything. Except she makes a mistake which ends her career, which makes it time to downsize. So Hélène and her family, a husband and two preteen daughters – though in a very unusual choice, her motherhood barely features in this story – relocate to Hélène’s sleepier hometown. The quality of life there is wonderful and the slower pace means it will be easier for Hélène to get her mind right. Things are off to an okay start until the night Hélène impulsively downloads a dating app and arranges a date. Out the restaurant window she sees a couple arguing in the parking lot and realises the bloke, Christophe (a less showily superb Bastien Bouillon), is someone she had a massive crush on in high school. She ditches the date to re-introduce herself, and when she awkwardly brings up that crush, Christophe mutters she should have mentioned it at the time. Suddenly the fresh start involves a whole new realm of possibility.
Mr. Bouillon is here playing essentially the same part as he did in Leave One Day which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival: a handsome man who found all he needed in his small hometown and therefore never left. For years Christophe played on the local ice hockey team, making him a regional celebrity, and even though he’s forty now the team has brought him back as a publicity stunt. Christophe isn’t up to it but is doing his best, because it’s very hard to find steady work in the age of zero-hour contracts, and also because he hopes it will impress his young son, who lives with his mother. Mr. Bouillon has a great line in men whose good looks and charm have enabled them to coast, but he’s able to add an edge of resentment and fear under all the bonhomie. Christophe’s ex was the woman with whom Hélène saw him arguing in the parking lot; she’s found full-time, permanent work, a wonderful thing, but hundreds of miles away. And while Christophe understands how important that job is he can’t help but be upset about the looming separation between him and his boy. So Hélène walks back into his life at just the right time.
Now everyone reading this will obviously take the sophisticated point of view that affairs are to be expected because lifetime monogamy is unrealistic. They will also obviously understand how lucky it is not only to restart a youthful infatuation from scratch, but also that two adults who like each other have the right timing. Both Hélène and Christophe are in search of something new, they are both too smart for this place, and they are both eager for the chance to build something together. Why would you judge the fact that Hélène is cheating on her husband and paying very little attention to her kids because she is so wrapped up in Christophe?
The great thing about the script, written by director Alex Lutz, Amélia Guyader and Hadrien Bichet as an adaption of the novel by Nicolas Mathieu, is the deliberate lack of judgement. Connemara is really about learning the value of taking your time. Hélène’s headlong plunge into a relationship with Christophe, which involves swiftly going public while still wearing her wedding ring, is maybe not the best idea! But you try telling that to someone who’s always thought she was smarter than everyone else.
The subtext about opportunity, intelligence and drive is the absolute core of the story. Hélène has spent her professional life devoted to the concept that there is only one best way to do everything and she is the best person to find it. Ms. Thierry makes it elegantly clear how important Hélène’s work is to her, and how shocked she is to find someone who fulfils her just as much as her career did. The sideways, or maybe backwards, move to her hometown also has her wondering whether she’s devoted her life to the right idea. The point is emphasized through flashbacks to a conversation with the mother of Hélène’s childhood best friend, a woman whose ambitions were stifled by small-town life, and who sees Hélène has the drive to escape to and then succeed in Paris which her own daughter does not. But just because Christophe is happy where he is doesn’t make him a less worthy or capable partner.
Mr. Lutz’s previous movie, Strangers by Night, began with two middle-aged strangers meeting so cute they immediately have a quickie in a Paris metro station. (After seeing this I asked many of my friends if there was any man in the world for whom they’d take off their underwear in a subway station and the answer was a resounding no.) When the strangers continue their impulsive hook-up by wandering around Paris overnight, the only question becomes whether their connection is strong enough to overpower the lives they have waiting for them at home. Mr. Lutz clearly enjoys telling complex adult stories about how the human heart can disrupt even the most carefully planned life. He has also worked with many of the same creatives on Connemara, most notably cinematographer Éponine Momenceau, who has a gift for finding the hungry moment that sticks in the memory like a sore. Her unusual and slightly blurred handheld style, like a photograph taken in haste, combined with Margot Meynier’s editing somehow manages to convey a potent physicality. The big finale at the wedding of one of Christophe’s friends is all the more powerful for being largely dialogue-free under the drunken guests enthusiastically belting out “Les lacs de Connemara.” The Cannes festival audience was roaring its approval before the final credits rolled, and for once it felt like the hype was entirely justified. If its focus was only on one woman’s altered plans for her life Connemara would still be an important achievement. But that ending. What an ending! An epiphany this palpable is very, very rare. And that makes Connemara is a movie not to miss.
PS: Thrilling to learn from French Wikipedia that the singer who owes his career to a song about Ireland has never actually been there.
Connemara recently screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
Learn more about Connemara at the Cannes site for the title.
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