I'm only used to making love to one person at a time so I was cautious about going to see Leaving. You see I love Kristin Scott Thomas very much, and I love Yvan Attal even more.
Much hay has been made recently about Frenchman Scott Thomas' decision to stop being Brit cinema's fuck buddy and devote herself to making proper movies. Even more scary for her, however, was being increasingly typecast as the "ice queen." This is what's interesting. It is precisely KST's role-history, her typecasting, which makes this particular performance so energised, so scintillating, so (can I say it?) electric.
Scott Thomas as adulteress Marion, looks frightened, looks cracked, looks mad in this movie. Her crisis, in itself a simple Bovary/Chatterly cliche, takes place underneath a wide eyed, alabaster. Underneath a Kristin Scott Thomas. That makes this film good.
Meanwhile: Yvan Attal, whose best performances are as the loveable villains, forgiveable adulterers of Ma femme est une actrice and Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants, here plays the adulteree, and he doesn't take it well. Attal's David is a monster, a grotesque, sexual oligarch, fixated with the ownership of his wife to the exclusion of every other emotion. Very un-French. Very un-charming. Very unpleasanct.
It seems to me that actors can never really, like seperate themselves from their previous performances. Serious actors; good, believable actors like Kristin Scott Thomas and Yvan Attal, create grand, complicated, faceted characters, as big and broad as a career. This is not bad. BUT, imaginatively cast, these actors can create special performances, special movies. That is what has happened here.
So this film owes everything to intelligent, imaginative casting and in a roundabout way, who we're complimenting here is Catherine Corsini. Thats why her head is at the top of this review. I'd like to have a passionate and dangerous affair with her, although not one with an explosive twist at the denouement.
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