Eddie Izzard famously poked fun at the painfully repressed nature of bourgeois British films – or, as he called them, “The Room With A View And A Staircase And A Pond-type movies” where characters wander in to beautiful rooms for interactions such as “Oh. I thought, I, well… I’d better go.” “Yes, I think you better had.”
Trade the pond for a forest, the English for French and add in a weirdly liberal dose of Michael Haneke’s Hidden and you’ve got Before The Winter Chill, Phillippe Claudel’s deliberate, chilly and malaise-driven tale of male menopause. The movie has a slow-burning feel that oddly and abruptly derails in its ludicrous final act.
Jaded neuro-surgeon Paul (Hidden’s Daniel Auteuil) is bored of his elegant life with his quietly knowing wife Lucie (Kristin Scott-Thomas.) When beautiful Moroccan waitress Lou begins sending him red roses, he finds himself drawn to the troubled young woman.
There’s a theme of intellectualism versus soulfulness, with Paul’s psychologist friend remarking, “You open their brains, I empty them.”
Claudel’s filmmaking is definitely on the surgical, rather than spiritual side. Interesting choices are made – the contrast between the carefully observed bourgeois quotidian of tennis and landscaping to the messy enigma of Lou’s life; Paul’s disturbed sister-in-law who bluntly calls out the irony of his striking, open-plan, glass house that contains a multitude of cloudy untruths; the organic, long-rootedness of gardener Lucie’s love over Lou’s clichéd, manicured offerings.
But served up in too-brief scenes of mannered frostiness, these biting insights seem observed, but never felt. Elegant but overburdened, the thriller proves numbing rather than chilling.