The film is incredible! It is an epic, yet humanizing film about love and lost love. The story is very poignant with amazing dialogue and very subtle plot progression. The story is literary novelesque in terms of the level of complexity in setting up characters that will come back to play out an important role in the third act. And the camerawork is so invisible that it completes the goal of capturing the stage, the theater and looking right past the screen at the actors behind it.
This film gets you right in the heart, right in the soul. The french know how to portray life and how to be so sincerely. The acting in french films is of a remarkably different calibre or manner than any other. It’s so real. French actors are not just present and acting truthfully under imaginary circumstances but hitting at a reality beyond presence. They are the living thing incarnate. The performances in this film are of no comparison in any other country or form, the actors entirely move and breathe as their character and are without any uncertain commitment in terms of their beats or choices.
This is definitely the high point of French Poetic Realism although I would argue that genre died once the Germans invaded. This film sits at the crossroads between Italian Neorealism and the Poetic Realism of the french 1930’s.
It’s simply one of the greatest films ever made. It shows you how important STORY STORY STORY and CHARACTER CHARACTER CHARACTER are to a film. The characters in this film are so extremely well-defined that all the actions of the actor are absolutely informed whatever they do.