Cécile de France is radiant in La Passagère (review)

Héloïse Pelloquet made a successful first feature film on her childhood island, Noirmoutier.

A few days after proposing Die to loveby André Cayatte with Annie Girardot, Arte continues its introspection of female desire with this other portrait of a woman falling in love with a (very) young man. If the first was inspired by a tragic news item (note that it is still visible in replay on the channel’s website), The Passenger is more solar. Released at the end of 2022 in cinemas, this first feature by Héloïse Pelloquet was very popular with First. Particularly for its casting: Cécile de France (The Spanish Inn, The Beautiful Season) and Félix Lefebvre (Summer 85, Supreme) are both excellent there. Here is our review.

It’s the story of love at first sight that arises in the life of Chiara, a forty-year-old (Cécile de France, radiant), happy and fulfilled in the couple she has formed for 20 years with a fisherman with whom she also shares the profession. The one – reciprocal – that she feels for Maxence (Félix Lefebvre, astonishing), 25 years her junior, whom she will try to resist before the impulses of the heart overwhelm the dikes of reason.

Heloïse Pelloquet tells the story of this passion which tries to ignore the what will we say of the small island where Chiara lives and where everyone knows everyone with a great sense of the romantic and a sensuality claimed in realistic love scenes but never voyeuristic where the female gauze bursts full screen. An exciting first feature film, right down to its epilogue, that is anything but conventional.

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