Beginning with an aerial shot of a car traversing the verdant urban outskirts to the more arid coastal verge, visuals beautifully accompanied by a sarabande by Vincent Delerme, Stephane Brize’s latest film, HORS-SAISON or OUT OF SEASON, is, in essence, an engaging film about ennui.
It’s winter. Approaching his 50th birthday, successful screen actor Mathieu is facing a crisis of confidence. Now is the winter of his discontent as just weeks out from his much-anticipated stage debut, he has fled rehearsals to check into a luxury health spa on the Brittany coast, leaving both the play’s perplexed and apoplectic director and his wife back home in Paris.
Being a major A-list celebrity, it’s impossible for Mathieu to lay low. Recognised everywhere he goes, the hotel staff and fellow guests are both ecstatic and intrigued about his presence, and the requests for selfies never end.
There’s a Tatiesque tone to the film in the beginning, with Mathieu’s seeking solitude to salve his stage fright and his encounters with both people and machines. Nowhere have panic attacks been treated with such panache!
Then suddenly, Mathieu receives a text message from Alice, a woman he’d dated fifteen years prior, who’s heard he’s in town; she’s now a wife and mother who by chance lives nearby. They agree to meet for lunch, each evidently torn by the manner in which they parted, she in particular.
Incisively written, Brizé’s elegant and wryly funny story of choices made and what might have been is distinguished by the exquisite chemistry of Alba Rohrwacher and Guillaume Canet as Alice and Mathieu, who at first lay on the lipstick of life with pleasant patter, circling with small talk, until the coursing blood of life spills from their past into their present, with recriminations, reconciliation and retreat.
In performances simmering with subtlety and restraint, they extol a screenplay that supplies nourishment as well as entertainment. OUT OF SEASON will resonate to anyone who has lived more seasons than one day out of adolescence.
