Before the Winter Chill
Before the Winter Chill
| 20 December 2013 (USA)
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They are the perfect French haute bourgeois couple: Paul is a respected surgeon and Lucie cooks and gardens exquisitely. But now, in the autumn of his life, Paul can’t resist the lure of an ambiguous and dangerous relationship with a mysterious young woman. Might there be something sinister behind the roses delivered to his office and the “chance” meetings?

Reviews
ManiakJiggy

This is How Movies Should Be Made

Boobirt

Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Afouotos

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

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Billie Morin

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

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paul2001sw-1

Philippe Claudel's film 'Before the Winter Chill' begins as if it's going to be a drama about a stalker. It then changes tack, and becomes more of a story about a middle aged man becoming involved with a younger woman. He's not exactly looking for an affair, but his interest in her clearly stems from unhappiness in his marriage, which obviously does not benefit from his behaviour. Yet his "care" for the girl is superficial; his real interest is in the effect she is having on him, and he misses things he might have observed. Yet just as this plotline plays out to its conclusion, the movie reveals a final twist. The problem is that all three stories seem weak and underdeveloped; the strength of feelings on display never quite sufficient to wholly motivate the plot. It's not implausible; but its more a film about the absence of feelings, than the presence of them.

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rowmorg

We watched this slow drama with a mounting sense of bewilderment, wondering what it was really about. It turned out that the neurosurgeon's girlfriend was actually linked to a murder gang that kept elderly men like himself bound up naked waiting for a grim death. This shakes Daniel Auteuil, for whom the young Moroccan woman represented a journey back to his origins. He was able to open up to the young woman in a way that he completely failed to with his wife: a perennial problem with men. Next, she is weeping in her miserable room and giving him a diskette made with her grandmother 20 years earlier. She tells him it's her most precious possession. Next thing, she's lying dead in her bath, suicided. The cops explain to the doctor that she was tortured by his fate, he was being tracked and studied by the gang. At the end, he sits contemplating her voice singing a lovely old love song about "coquelicots" or poppies. It's a haunting film made with loving care and well worth seeing.

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writers_reign

Philippe Claudel made a stunning debut with his first feature-length film I've Loved You So Long and has retained some of the elements - not least Kristin Scott Thomas in Before The Winter Chill. In the former movie Scott Thomas played a doctor who'd been struck off the register after the mercy killing of her terminally ill small son; this time around she is the wife of a neuro-surgeon Daniel Auteuil and both are best friends with psychiatrist Richard Berry. Auteuil has contrived to postpone his mid- life crisis until well into his sixties and it takes the shape of a young waitress/whore,Lou, some forty years his junior. This is, of course, plot enough for films set in the world of today but Claudel thickens the broth by straying into David Mamet territory and investing Lou with a mysterious and sinister extra layer or two. All three principals turn in excellent performances and if it fails to eclipse or even equal I've Loved You So Long it comes pretty close.

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GUENOT PHILIPPE

That's exactly what I waited for. Daniel Auteuil is here as excellent as ever. I have always considered him as one of the best french actors ever. The poignant and sensitive tale of a wealthy surgeon who has a boring life, boring wife and family, a job that brings him to burn out and whose fate leads him to meet a young woman.The following is totally unforeseeable. The relationship that develops between the two of them is not what you might expect. It is so odd that it is impossible to describe. Offbeat at the most, but so pure and beautiful. This is not a romance. Unfortunately, the - near - ending is very abrupt and may disturb the audiences. But it doesn't destroy the story's quality.It is only unusual, far from you may have waited for in such kind of stories.

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