A Simple Heart

Colour, 35 mm
France, 2007, 105 min
Section: Horizons

Synopsis

When the amorous enchantment of a young provincial girl named Félicité ends up being short-lived, the lonely girl enters the service of a wealthy family as the maid of a strict and withdrawn widow, Mathilde Aubain, where she is to run the household and take care of the woman’s small son and daughter. In music lessons, tutoring, children’s games and trips to the beach or the countryside, Félicité’s spontaneity and warmth show her to be a natural partner for the children to the exclusion of their dispassionate mother. Mathilde has a different notion of how to raise children and what’s more she is jealous of Félicité, and her remoteness towards her is not mollified even by the hard knocks of fate that afflict both her and the wretched maid over the years. Félicité, the embodiment of unconditional goodness, seems to be fragile and defenceless, but it becomes more and more difficult to determine which of the women is actually the stronger... A film avowing the frugality of Bresson, with the compellingly understated performance of Sandrine Bonnaire,  Vermeeresque interiors and references to the refinement of classical landscape painting.

About the director

Marion Laine is a French actress, director and screenwriter. She has appeared in thirteen movies and in television series in particular and directed three films, writing the screenplays for all three. The first two she directed were short – Derrière la porte (1999) – and medium-length – Hôtel des Acacias (2003). Her latest project is her first feature-length film, A Simple Heart (2007), an adaptation of a short story of the same name by Gustave Flaubert which was published twenty years after the famous novel Madame Bovary (1857).