Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
Diane Kurys directed Entre Nous, also known as Coup de foudre, in 1983. It is a semi-autobiographical work, co-scripted by Kurys and based on a novel by Kurys. It is something of a prequel to Kurys’ debut film, Peppermint Soda (1977). Considering that the story relates to the marriage of her own parents, Kurys does an impressive job maintaining distance and objectivity from her subject matter, resulting in a film of extraordinary sensitivity and honesty.
The Story: The story opens in 1942 in France during the German occupation. Helene (“Lena”) Weber (Isabelle Huppert), a Belgian Jew living in France, has been arrested and sent to a refugee camp, from where she will likely be deported to Germany and certain death in one of the concentration camps. Her life is saved, however, by an amazing offer of marriage from a Foreign Legion man, Michel (Guy Marchand), who works in the food line of the camp, though they have never met. He is about to be discharged and has been given permission to marry. Lena is uncertain how to respond until a friend in the camp points out that “phony marriages don’t count.” Lena agrees to the marriage but is disconcerted to discover during the ceremony that the man has a very Jewish sounding name: Isaac Mordeha Simon Korski. With difficulty, the pair flees France into Italy, hiking the last few miles over the Alps.
The story then jumps ahead a decade or so to 1952. Lena and Michel are still married and living in liberated France with two lovely daughters, Florence and Sophie (Saga Blanchard). Michel has built a good life for their family. After smuggling gold for a while, he parlayed that nest egg to start an auto repair business, which he works at diligently. Lena, on the other hand, is largely unfulfilled in her life. She only has to care for the children. She is a good mother but, even there, is outshined by her husband, who is great with the kids. Although Michel loves his wife intensely, the two have little in common. Lena is better educated, more cultured and sophisticated but less dependable or productive than her husband. Michel’s interests are limited to soccer, politics, and his work. His anger gets the best of him at times. Lena is self-centered and sometimes irresponsible and dishonest.
Their shaky marriage is further destabilized when Lena meets a woman named Madeleine (Miou-Miou). Madeleine also suffered from the war. Her husband at the time was accidentally shot by the resistance, dying in her arms. After a bout of inconsolable depression and living with her parents, Madeleine had encountered her art teacher, Carlier (Patrick Bauchau), who had urged her not to stay there and be suffocated. Bouncing back, she had met a struggling actor names Costa (Jean-Pierre Bacri), gotten pregnant, and married him. Though Madeleine is confident and extroverted, she is no happier with her marriage than is Lena and is also an indifferent parent to her son, René (Guillaume Le Guellec). Madeleine is vivacious and full of life, which appeals to the more reserved Lena, and the two soon become fast friends.
At Lena’s insistence, Michel agrees to inviting Madeleine and Costa to dinner. At the end of the evening, Madeleine whispers to Lena, “He’s not right for you.” Lena discovers that she is a lot happier when she is with Madeleine that with her family. Michel and Costa become friends as well, although more from the misery of being mutually excluded from their wives’ affections. When Michel makes a pass at Madeleine, Madeleine merely informs Lena, establishing where the strongest loyalties lie. Costa chances upon what he believes to be an opportunity to make some quick money, selling black market shirts from America. He takes a loan from Michel to finance the deal but it turns out that the shirts only have one sleeve each. Lena and Madeleine fear that the two men will never speak to one another again if Michel is not paid back, which will also make it difficult for the two women to continue to see one another. Lena steals the $200 from Michel’s cash register at the shop and gives it to Madeleine who uses it to “repay” the loan. Michel later discovers the missing money and is planning to fire the mechanic. Lena at least has the decency to fess up rather than let the poor mechanic lose his job. She then makes up a story about using it to purchase a marble tombstone for her mother's gravestone. This story later falls apart as well.
Lena and Madeleine begin to dream about opening a dress shop together. When they go into the city to check out a vacant storefront, they become so caught up in their excitement that they lose track of Lena’s younger daughter, Sophie. The little girl shows up later at Michel auto shop saying, “Mommy forgot me.”
Michel later puts up the money for the dress shop but insists that Lena stop seeing Madeleine as a condition. Madeleine leaves Costa and moves to Paris. She later has a nervous breakdown. When Lena stops receiving letters from Madeleine, she tracks her down and brings her back for the grand opening of the shop. When Michel finds her there, he loses control and smashes up the brand new shop. This leads to the breakup of their marriage, though he clearly wants to continue to make a go of it.
Themes:Entre Nous explores an issue at the core of modern society – the nature of marriage and commitment. It is about feeling trapped and the need for personal fulfillment. It is about selfishness versus personal sacrifice. It touches on much of what is at issue in the woman’s movement. Instead of simplistic, one-sided answers, the film presents the issues in the context of real people with idiosyncrasies and personal limitations and demonstrates the costs and suffering that exist regardless of which answers one chooses.
Neither Michel nor Lena is exclusively to blame when their marriage ultimately collapses, but neither is blame-free. Michel loves his wife, is an exceptionally attentive father to their children, and works hard to provide the material needs of his family. On the other hand, he is insensitive to Lena’s interests and needs and loses his temper with her too readily. Lena does not truly respect or love her husband, whom she views as beneath her in social class. She apparently is also not especially satisfied by him sexually. On the other hand, she sometimes deceives him, steals money from his cash register on one occasion, lies about the reason, and cheats on him while traveling to Paris. She encourages a friendship with Madeleine that poses a risk to her marriage and family. Lena is suffering from lack of fulfillment in the marriage; her children and Michel suffer from its dissolution.
The question of just how firm the marriage vows should be considered and how much personal cost one must bear rather than dissolving a marriage is a fundamental question that our society still grapples with today. The Catholic Church, for example, repudiates divorce while the woman’s movement emphasizes the importance of women being able to extricate themselves from abusive relationships. My personal view is that neither absolute position on the sanctity of marriage is sustainable – the personal costs are just too high when society takes either an overly rigid or overly lax view of the marriage commitment. No woman (or man, for that matter) should feel compelled to remain in a marriage that is destructive to mental or physical health or emotional well-being, either out of respect for marriage vows or for the sake of the children. On the other hand, neither marriage vows nor the well-being of children should be treated lightly and sacrificed willy-nilly because a marriage is simply not all-fulfilling. It is really asking too much of marriage to expect it to satisfy all of one’s needs – for personal fulfillment, growth as a person, or even for fireworks in bed. On the other hand, a person has a right to expect that a marriage will not actively prevent him or her from finding their way to personal fulfillment by their own initiative and hard work. Individuals in a marriage need to distinguish between abuses and deficiencies. If the marriage includes elements that are emotionally or physically abusive (i.e., errors of commission), one has every right to work one’s way out of that marriage even if there are costs to others. If, on the other hand, the marriage is merely lacking in one or more positive elements (nearly every marriage is), one should consider accepting what the marriage has to offer and then completing one’s own existence in whatever additional ways are important for self-satisfaction through one’s own initiative, independent of the marriage. We are each, in the end, responsible for our own happiness. Obviously, if there are minimal costs to dissolving a marriage (no children still at home; mutual agreement), one could consider dissolving a marriage even if there are no particular negatives, but merely too few positives. But if commitment means anything, missing positives should not alone be adequate basis for breaking up a family when children are involved.
From that perspective, Lena’s decision to end her marriage to Michel does not stand up to moral scrutiny. Her main issue, as depicted in the film, was lack of personal fulfillment. Yet, there was opportunity for her to reach for that fulfillment without abandoning her marriage. She was well on her way to setting up her dress shop and establishing a career for herself. Another issue, perhaps, was the need to have someone in her life of similar sensitivities and interests. Madeleine provided that for Lena. Lena states, at one point, that she would suffocate without her friendship with Madeleine. One could argue that Michel’s effort, near the end, to force Lena to cut off her relationship with Madeleine was a denial of Lena’s opportunity for happiness in life. On the other hand, Michel’s perception that Madeleine posed a threat to his marriage and his family was actually spot-on. Madeleine revealed her disregard for Michel and for Lena’s daughters when she whispered to Lena that Michel was not right for her. It was very presumptuous of Madeleine to encourage that idea based on one evening of observation. Madeleine had little sense of responsibility toward her own son and even less toward Lena’s children. Madeleine boasts, for example that she remained thin throughout her pregnancy, revealing where her priorities lay. In the end, Lena chose her friendship with Madeleine over the opportunity of her children to live with a father who interacted with them very effectively and lovingly. From a humanistic moral perspective, there was more loss than gain when the overall impact of Lena’s decision is assessed taking all the parties into account.
One mitigating circumstance is the condition under which Lena and Michel married in the first place. There can hardly be said to have been much choice involved, given that the alternative was deportation to Germany and certain death. Lena never loved Michel. In a sense, the “phony” marriage never did count in her mind – much as her friend at the camp had suggested. Nevertheless, Lena’s subsequent choice to have children with Michel should have been predicated on a commitment, at that point at least, to the marriage (so long as it remained nonabusive). In a sense, Sophie’s comment about the incident where her mother lost track of her in the city could just as well sum up her mother’s choice, under Madeleine’s influence, to abandon her marriage with René’s father: “They forgot me.”
Production Values: Kurys has related through Entre Nous a very personal story with grace and sensitivity. The principal characters in Entre Nous are all complex, interesting people, though not entirely admirable. The continuity of the narrative suffers at times, leaving a lot for viewers to work out on their own, but the interest level is nevertheless maintained.
The performance by Isabelle Huppert is arguably the highlight of Entre Nous. Huppert is exceptionally talented at revealing inner feelings with simple expressions. We see Lena breaking out of her inner shell and opening up by a few simple smiles on Huppert’s face. Her beauty is quite evident throughout the film. Huppert also appeared in Going Places (1974), Every Man for Himself (1980), Coup de Torchon (1981), Story of Women (1988), Madame Bovery (1991), and La Cérémonie (1995). Miou-Miou, who played Madeleine very effectively, appeared earlier in Going Places (1974) and Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976). Guy Marchand was very convincing as Michel. His other credits include Cousin, Cousine (1975) and Coup de Torchon (1981).
Bottom-Line: Personally, I prefer Kurys’ other autobiographical film, Peppermint Soda, even more, but since one isn’t limited to just one or the other, I’ll take both. They complement one another, since Entre Nous deepens one’s understanding of the family circumstances in the earlier film. Entre Nous is likely a film that female viewers will enjoy somewhat more on average than male viewers, it being primarily focused on marital issues from the vantage point of the women. The men are given fair treatment in the film, however, and come across as no more flawed, overall, than their wives. Kurys simply presents the facts of the case and doesn’t appear to be arguing either for or against Lena’s ultimate decision to give precedence to her friendship over her marriage. Some reviewers characterize the ending as a happy one while others view it as tragic, but either way, the viewer’s impression about the denouement has more to do with his or her own view of relationship priorities. Thus, the film manages to be thought-provoking while also being entertaining.
Entre Nous is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 110 minutes.
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