An affair to remember… Along Came Love

ALONG CAME LOVE
Directed by Katell Quillévéré
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆☆

DIRECTOR Katell Quillévéré has a personal reason for making this film. She revealed that her grandmother kept a secret from her family for almost her entire life –­ only revealing the truth of her wartime experience in her last days. She had had an affair with a German soldier during the occupation of France, and her oldest child was conceived through this forbidden relationship.

No wonder Quillévéré has carefully created this story, and given her two protagonists the room to develop as characters: you can feel in each scene her sadness for the story her grandmother felt she had to keep secret for so long, an individual tragedy among the many millions the conflict created.

We meet Madeleine (Anais Demoustier), a waitress in a post-war seaside hotel, living with her young son and, as with the rest of France, coming to terms with the post-traumatic shock of the Second World War.

They are ostracised from her family and her community. She has moved to this nondescript port for reasons that she reveals – the father of Daniel, her son, was German officer sent to the Eastern Front and never heard of again.

Madeleine’s father shaved her head and banished her for her behaviour. She has moved to another place so no one can judge her.

Francois (Vincent Lacoste) is the son of an upper-class factory owner, an intellectual with his own secrets, his own motivations for keeping his past love life away from those who may judge.

The story begins with moving archive footage of the liberation of France by Allied troops, and then skips to the late 1940s to show the couple meeting.

The pair marry and Daniel becomes Francois’ son. As the boy grows up, he has questions he seeks answers to as the couple try to forge new stories for themselves from the ruins of their previous relationships.

Quillévéré then takes us through decades to give the story a longevity that offers a firmer foundation for what the director is trying to consider: how societal mores and rules impacts on those who find themselves on the “wrong” side. While the waitress and the student do not at first seem to have that much in common, apart from both being achingly lonely, they are both being judged.

Beautifully acted, and lovely to look at, this slow-paced love story is believably sad and powerful.