Suite Française (2015) (English Language)

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Review

107min

Cast: Michelle Williams, Matthias Schoenaerts…and many more

Writers: Matt Charman, Saul Dibb, Irène Némirovsky

Set in the early days of the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, Michelle Williams stars as a young French villager caught between her burgeoning feelings towards a very different sort of German officer and the hatred towards the occupiers from her family and fellow villagers.

‘Suite Française’ is every inch the stylish period piece brought to life by a multi-national ensemble cast but this adaptation of a set of unfinished novels never really gets away from the archetypal “forbidden lovers” scenario that sits at the heart what should be a far more complex human drama.

The original novel on which this film is based was for years a set of unfinished manuscripts by Irène Némirovsky who died in Auschwitz but whose work was found by her daughter and completed over half a century later, that is a bestselling novel about the complexities of the Nazi occupation of France most of which is lost in this adaptation.

The result is a simplistic overview anchored in a predictable “Montague and Capulet-esque” love story, the demure young lady who loses her husband to the War and is oppressed by her strict mother-in-law meets the elegant and sensitive Nazi officer with whom she shares a love of piano suites.

Perhaps depending on the success ‘Suite Française’ we hope to see a continuing adaptation of Némirovsky’s work which would shed further light on the exodus from Paris to the countryside of the newly occupied French and indeed the rise of the fight-back which would become “La Résistance”.

As it is ‘Suite Française’ is a stylish romantic drama about forbidden love that might be to some people’s taste but ironically lacks passion and depth while painting the Nazi occupation of small-town France with a distinctly quaint and clichéd stroke.

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