Leaving

Director Catherine Corsini.
With Kristin Scott Thomas and Yvan Attal.
Released 9 July.

In Britain, we like our great actresses to be hearty head girls or dotty maiden aunts—good sports who laugh at themselves and shorten their names to Judi or Maggie or Kate. Then there's Kristin Scott Thomas. In film after film, Scott Thomas has remained poised and elegant, with a nimbus of superiority floating around her like perfume. She may be the Oscar-nominated star of numerous commercial and critical smashes—from Four Weddings and a Funeral to The English Patient to Gosford Park—but neither Hollywood nor Britain has been quite sure what to do with her. There are only so many haughty sophisticate roles to go around.

The twist is that Scott Thomas, as archetypally English as she might seem, is a fluent French speaker who has lived in Paris for three decades. And in recent years, it's the French film industry that's given her some of her best roles. The latest of these is in Leaving, the kind of mature, provocative relationship drama that is rarely made on this side of the English Channel or on the other side of the Atlantic.

Scott Thomas plays a doctor's wife who lives in bourgeois luxury in the sunny south of France. Life is so comfortable, in fact, that she's eager to resume the physiotherapy career she curtailed when she had the first of her two children, so her husband pays a handyman (Yvan Attal) to refurbish one of the property's outbuildings as a consulting room for her. The handyman is a brawny Catalan who's not long out of prison—a completely different type of person from anyone she knows. But that doesn't stop the two near-strangers from charging into an affair. Scott Thomas confesses all to her husband almost immediately, and then announces that she's leaving him for her boyfriend.

In most films, the decision to move out of the family home would require numerous scenes of guilt and hesitation, but the practicalities would be easy. In Leaving, the opposite is true. Scott Thomas takes no time to decide what she wants to do, but the realities of the situation are fearsomely difficult. Where are she and her paramour going to live? What are they going to live on? Time and again, the movies tell us that love conquers all. Leaving is intelligent enough to ask whether love can really overcome poverty, alienation from your previous existence, and the political influence of a husband who's determined not to let you go.

As for Scott Thomas, she's superb in a role that takes her from giggly infatuation and lustful abandon to rage and desperation. Her usual cool, calm and collected self seems a long way away.

Nicholas Barber