Director Catherine Corsini’s edgy take on mature age infidelity never quite amounts to the sum of its parts, despite an authoritative performance from its lead actress, Kristin Scott Thomas.
Leaving is an altogether frustrating film to watch at times – Corsini and her co-scriptwriter Gaëlle Macé find compelling drama in many of their key scenes, only to stumble with rote support players and middling melodramatic plotting at key moments.
Running to a miserly (but not unwelcome) 84 minutes, Corsini wastes no time setting up the archetypal characters that will enact this straightforward morality tale.
Scott Thomas is Suzanne, a striking, vibrant woman in her late 40s who is about to embark on a late-in-life career as a self-employed physiotherapist. Though committed to her home life and teenage children (Alexandre Vidal, Daisy Broom), she has stagnated amidst the bourgeois trappings of her southern French lifestyle.
Her husband Samuel (a weasly Yves Nattal), a high-profile, well-connected doctor, is financing the construction of her home office and unwisely in hindsight, leaves her to oversee the handiwork of the swarthy Spanish ex-crim, Ivan (Sergi Lopez). A friendship soon develops; when Suzanne indirectly causes Ivan to suffer a terrible injury, she volunteers to drive him to Spain to see his young daughter and, following a stolen kiss on cobble-stoned street, a passionate affair begins.
Energised by some pretty spectacular sex (which the audience gets to enjoy in all its grunting, acrobatic glory) and alive to the idea of a rustic-cottage lifestyle in the Spanish hills, Suzanne flees her marriage with a devil-may-care nonchalance. Her fanciful, dreamlike existence is fleeting, though; she is brought back to a cruel reality when Samuel, his ego crushed and his social-standing decimated, unleashes his scorned fury on the pair.
Corsini’s narrative skips along at an unfettered pace, which proves to be both a blessing and a hindrance. Scott Thomas, commanding the screen despite a rake-thin, wide-eyed fragility, makes the head-first hedonism and excruciating unravelling of Suzanne’s life seem fully fleshed out. But that it remains so compelling is testament to the empathy that the actress engenders and not to any depth in the script. Despite the presence of accomplished actors in both roles, Samuel and Ivan dip in and out of importance to the story and ultimately amount to little more than the 'evil husband’ and the 'ex-con-with-a-heart-of-gold’ clichés. (Tellingly, for example, Corsini refuses to divulge what put Ivan away for six years.)
Oddly, the film’s prologue dilutes any sense of tension within the film – it demands a focus on the characters’ emotional lives, which don’t always warrant the gaze. Also under-played is the impact of the affair on the children, including Ivan’s pre-teen daughter (Berta Esquirol) who is mostly framed out of shot, so insignificant is her plight to Corsini’s story.
Yet, despite its many shortcomings, the film remains watchable and entertaining. One assumes that all involved were aiming a lot higher than the heartfelt soap opera in which they ultimately found themselves – a view that will be shared by audience members used to more profound works by the above-the-line names that drew them to the cinema. Leaving is by no means a bad film; it’s just not a very important one.
