Suite Française *** (2014, Michelle Williams, Kristin Scott Thomas, Matthias Schoenaerts) – Movie Review

Montana-born Michelle Williams stars as Lucille Angellier, a young, attractive French villager who is living trapped in a stifled existence with her unpleasant and controlling mother-in-law Madame Angellier (Kristin Scott Thomas) while they await news of her prisoner of war husband during the early years of German occupation of France in 1940. Parisian refugees start to arrive in their small town, followed by a regiment of German soldiers.

The handsome and charming Matthias Schoenaerts also stars as Bruno von Falk, a refined German officer who is billeted in the Angelliers’ comfortable home – to the suppressed rage of Madame but less so to the sensitive Lucille, who takes a quick and quiet liking to the good-mannered German, and a chaste romance blossoms between them.

Lambert Wilson plays the Mayor, Viscount de Montmort, and Harriet Walter is his wife the Viscountess, a woman even more unpleasant and controlling than Madame Angellier in a sub-plot that gets a tragic payback for the couple.

Williams and Scott Thomas, give brisk and professional performances, doing all they can with what they are offered in Saul Dibb and Matt Charman’s sparse screenplay, based on Irène Némirovsky’s 2004 fact-based bestselling novel. But it is the Belgian star Matthias Schoenaerts who is the making of the movie in a truly outstanding performance, as charming as he is convincing, as a good German.

The film looks handsome, with good period detail, but a lot of the details in the story don’t ring true or convince. And, in the end, this pleasing, escapist movie is best seen as a simple, straightforward and quite appealing chocolate box romance, very light on wartime complexities and tragedies. More toughness and rigour would be welcome in this story, but this just isn’t that kind of film.

It also features Sam Riley as a French soldier called Benoit, Riley’s wife Alexandra Maria Lara, Margot Robbie as Celine and Ruth Wilson as Madeleine. Saul Dibb is also the director and previously made The Duchess (2008). Schoenaerts next stars in A Little Chaos (2014) and plays Gabriel Oak in the 2015 remake of Far from the Madding Crowd.

Némirovsky’s novel Suite Française was written during the Nazi occupation of France but published posthumously in 2004.

Filming took place in the village of Marville in the Meuse department. The cast and crew spent eight weeks shooting in Belgium and eight days in France in June and July 2013.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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