Director: Carine Tardieu (France, Belgium). Year of Release: 2021
Lyon, December 2006. Late night in a hospital. Shauna is visiting her friend Mathilde who’s on her way out. Downstairs, she meets Pierre, the duty doctor who has a black beard. As they share an awful soup from the coffee vending machine, Shauna shows Pierre a photo of her and Mathilde, telling him that Mathilde’s son works in the hospital. As Pierre takes the photo, he is called away to see another patient. By the time he returns, Shauna has gone – as, in her way, has Mathilde.
15 years later
Pierre still has a black beard, although it’s now flecked with grey. He now runs an oncology department, but is less in charge of his own life. He’s late for work, but first needs to find his passport which he uses instead of the hospital ID card that he lost ages back. Pierre calls upon his long-suffering wife Jeanne who locates the passport near Pierre’s toothbrush, where he left it so he’d remember it in the morning. He rushes out, calling goodbyes to their two kids.
Pierre visits a conference in Dublin, along with his friend and fellow doctor Georges, who somehow persuades him to leave their hotel and to stay in his mother’s friend’s cottage on the Irish coast. Turns out the friend is Shauna, and that Georges is the doctor she mentioned 15 years ago. Shauna normally lives in Paris, but stays at the cottage when she needs to convalesce, which she has been needing to do more often lately.
In the middle of the night, Pierre hears Shauna calling after her dog. He follows her to the beach, where he promptly loses his keys. He can’t be trusted with anything when Jeanne’s not around. Pierre assures Shauna that she didn’t wake him – he was trying to help a patient who has breast cancer and is facing a mastectomy. Pierre needs to convince the pharmaceutical companies to invest In a new treatment which may be able to help her retain her breast.
If you’ve seen the trailer or have heard anything about the film, you know where all this is heading, but it’s to director Cardine Tardieu’s credit that she takes her time. Pierre and Shauna do not immediately fall in love – or maybe they do, but they don’t show it explicitly. Instead we see a gradual wooing where, like teenagers, they dare to get close each other, sending text messages that they immediately regret and wander whether it’s ok to phone the other.
The process is slowed down further by the fact that Pierre lives in Lyon and Shauna in Paris. It helps that work often calls him to Paris, but he usually have to get the first train back. Besides which, there’s not an easy way of asking your 70 year old acquaintance if she fancies inviting you home to stay the night. But, after a number of false starts, this is what eventually happens – as it had to for the plot to get to where it needed to go.
Once the pair get together, we see the developing reactions from the various other characters (this is a good film for well-rounded secondary characters). Almost all are shocked by the age difference, not least Georges who sees no problem in chasing women who are half his age. When Jeanne first hears that Pierre has been playing away, at first she doesn’t want to know any more, but when she hears about Shauna’s age she first laughs then has a fit.
Whether we like it or not, much of the drama comes from the fact that Shauna is a woman and Pierre is a man – more accurately that she is an older woman and he is a younger man. What the other characters all see as scandalously transgressive would barely cause them to raise an eyebrow if he were 70 and she – how old is Pierre? – 40, 50? The film does not judge but sits back and observes reactions which are depressingly plausible.
Then again, the characters are flawed but not raving bigots. Jeanne in particular is remarkably indulgent of her errant husband – preferring to compromise to save her marriage Even after she throws Pierre out, she’s later prepared to make one last visit to the woman who stole her husband’s heart. This also is perfectly plausible – relationships are dirty and awkward and we do all sorts of self-destructive things for love.
The soundtrack is mainly light classical, pieces that the casual listener might recognise without necessarily being able to name the tune or composer. Some are played on the piano in the Gate de Lyon by an unnamed young woman with black nail polish and fingerless gloves. There is one non-classical song. Around halfway through the film, as the camera pans in on Shona’s face, we hear Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy sing A Lady of a Certain Age.
Hannon’s lyrics could poignantly be Shauna’s inner monologue:
Back in the day you had been part of the smart set
You’d holidayed with kings, dined out with starlets
From London to New York, Cap Ferrat to Capri
In perfume by Chanel and clothes by Givenchy …
And if a nice young man would buy you a drink
You’d say with a conspiratorial wink
“You wouldn’t think that I was seventy*”
And he’d say, “no, you couldn’t be!”
(*apparently this has been re-recorded, as it’s 63 (later 53) in the original, but we’ll allow a little poetic license)
Notwithstanding the older woman – younger man angle, Im Herzen Jung is fairly conventional fare, although it has no reason not to be. It tells a simple love story and we are invited to in turn sympathise and be frustrated by the well-drawn characters. It doesn’t do much more than this, and it doesn’t go overboard on the age difference, preferring to treat us as thinking adults and draw our own conclusions.
CinePhil 