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A middle-class woman (Isabelle Huppert) leaves her safe long-term relationship with her boss (Guy Marchand) for good sex and a socially-marginal existence with a roughly handsome unemployed working-class man (Gerard Depardieu). Shot largely in long handheld takes, the film posits sex as a force that shatters not only class allegiances and established social patterns but even the order represented by conventional narrative structures. Eliciting spontaneous and improvised performances from his actors, Pialat blends a loosely told love story with an acute social observation of the sexual and social mores of France in the seventies. The characters’ actions and behaviours are presented straightforwardly without moralising, enabling an open-ended exploration of the way class differences play out in power relations between the sexes.
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How to watch
Collection
In ACMI's collection
Credits
Collection metadata
ACMI Identifier
318322
Languages
English
French
French
Subject categories
Advertising, Film, Journalism, Mass Media & TV → Foreign language films
Economics, Philosophy, Politics, Religion & Sociology → Working class in motion pictures
Family, Gender Identity, Relationships & Sexuality → Relationships
Feature films → Feature films - France
Food, Health, Lifestyle, Medicine, Psychology & Safety → Love
Sound/audio
Sound
Colour
Colour
Holdings
DVD; Access Print (Section 1)