No love story is complete without a dose of pain. But when it comes to physical, forced pain and there are pistols and latex rompers in the game, then a love story takes on a darker side. A banker with masochistic tendencies (Benoît Poelvoorde) asks a beautiful woman (Laetitia Casta) to be his dominatrix. She is dragged along in his hunger for humiliation and subjection, but herself is emotionally chained to her husband, for whom she does everything. The love triangle heads for a fatal climax. Set in a romantic no man’s land somewhere between Europe and the USA, echoed in the mixture of French and American love songs on the soundtrack. In a moral sense, the film is also in a twilight zone. Judgement, questions of guilt, psychology, explanation – it is all left out. The protagonists are so neutral they don’t even have names. All that counts is trust, daring and the intensity of love.
Film details
Countries of production
France, Luxembourg
Year
2012
Festival edition
IFFR 2013
Length
80'
Medium/Format
DCP
Language
French
Premiere status
International premiere
Director
Hélène Fillières
Producer
Matthieu Tharot, Jani Thiltges
Principal cast
Reda Kateb, Richard Bohringer
Screenplay
Hélène Fillières, based on a novel by Régis Jauffret