Restarting her career as a physiotherapist isn’t good enough for bored stay-at-home mom Suzanne (Kristin Scott Thomas). Her eyes reveal an empty, irritable disconnect between herself and her husband, their beautiful home and sometimes apathetic teenage children. Suzanne’s face lights up, however, with the thought of Ivan (Sergi Lopez), the off-the-books Spanish handyman who was hired to build her home office. He eyes her instantly and she soon pays his interest back in full.
Such is the scenario of the French erotic thriller by writer-director Catherine Corsini, Leaving (out on DVD). Suzanne’s husband, a successful and well-connected physician, isn’t initially a bad sort, perhaps a little self-absorbeduntil she tells him she’s in love with Ivan. His response is revealing: he wants to know only whether she’s had sex with Ivan and how often, not what might have triggered her response to the laborer. Since she is leaving him and the children, French law is on his side, and he has the influence to make her money vanish and her employment opportunities disappear.
The drama becomes almost operatic when the husband turns vengeful, stopping at nothing to imprison his wife in a marriage she no longer wants. Good acting anchors the story with the cast disappearing entirely into their roles. Suzanne is the more sympathetic half of the married couple, yet her heedlessness and lack of foresight diminish her. Perhaps she is every bit as self-absorbed as the husband she hopes to escape?
