Le Temps de l'aventure (Just a Sigh) (邂逅之時) (2013)

A down and out struggling stage actress in her late 30s or early 40s who just finished playing a minor role for an Ibsen play in a small provincial  theatre which can't even pay her the remuneration owed her and whose primary school teacher cohabitee Antoine (who never actually appeared throughout the entire film) is always too busy to answer her incessant telephone calls professing her need of him made at public phone booths and who had to rush to "borrow" some money to pay for her café at a Parisian brasserie from her wealthy middle-aged and apparently "happily" married elder sister whose most urgent business in life appears to be doing yoga and beauty treatment  at her garden stealing  "casual" glances from time to time (apparently out of boredom) at a middle-aged gentleman  on her way from a Calais-Paris train for an audition for a film. She followed him after hearing that the gentleman was asking a passer-by if she knew English and if so how he could go from the Gare du Nord to a Parisian church for a funeral, first to the site of the funeral and then to his hotel.  An "impossible" relationship developed at the end of which the man, an  English literature professor, asked her if she would go back to England with him. She hesitated but finally declined. A simple enough French romance one often finds in the kind of penny novels favored by dissatisfied daydreaming housewives having a little time to spare after their daily domestic chores of tending to the humdrum needs of their husbands' and/or children in their otherwise lack lustre lives. But at the hands of director-writer Jérôme Bonnell and through the subtle and sensitive acting of Emmanuelle Devos as Alix and Gabriel Bryne as Doug, the story takes on a kind of credibility as only the French could pull off.

The camera is never too close, nor too far away from the actor and actress. It almost seems as if the director is doing a documentary. We never know what is going to happen next as we follow the movements of the protagonist: her nervous motions of putting coins into the public phone booths and leaving her messages but only getting the kind of standard politely worded pre-recorded message that the intended callee is unable to answer her call and to leave her message after the relevant "bleep" tone, of looking at the English gentleman sitting diagonally at an aisle seat some 6 feet or so away for whom she felt a certain unnameable attraction and once discovered immediately lowering her head and looking away pretending not to be paying any attention to him, her audition for a TV film of requiring her to play with more emotion with a male actor, her flying into a rage when her sister suggested patronisingly that she wanted more money than she was actually asking to borrow from her but that she was just too proud to ask, the way she hovered around in front of the entrance of the man's hotel and when asked why she was following him, denied that she was "following" him but that she "found" him and then finally summoning enough courage to knock at his hotel room door.

The credibility of the film is helped in no small measure by the music of Raf Keunen and the cinematography by Pascal Lagriffoul but there is not the slightest doubt that the greatest contribution is made by Emmanuelle Devos's acting. She portrays extremely well the kind of suppressed frustration and the need for relief from her temporary or perhaps prolonged set backs and her hesitations and impotence to make any radical changes in her life and the film ends as if it were just a slice in her life. What will happen to her? Will she change her mind and later go to England after all? It's anybody's guess. And the film ends on that note of uncertainty lingering in our mind. For this film Devos won the best actress award at the Cabourg Romantic Film Festival 2013 and the director Bonnell won the best director award.