The poster for An Impossible Love shows a man with his back turned, eyes averted, hands in pockets. He’s facing a woman and a young girl who peaks out shyly from behind her. The woman’s smile is earnest and warm, mirroring the sunny blue sky. But the man’s posture is inscrutable and the child, cast into shade by her smiling mother, looks uninvolved. It’s a subtle portent, a sign we might retroactively decode as a warning. Although first impressions might suggest otherwise, Catherine Corsini’s latest film An Impossible Love (2018) isn’t a simple pas de deux but a record of exploitation in the name of love, far from the ‘rom-com’ it has been promoted as. In fact, the film chronicles the sticky and painful attachments of a mother and daughter to an abusive lover and father over the course of 40 years and three generations.
Adapted from the French writer Christine Angot’s autofiction of the same title and narrated by Angot doppelganger Jehnny Beth (of the postpunk group Savages), An Impossible Love opens in the rural town of Châteauroux in 1958. The first ‘section’ chronicles a heady romance bridging class divides between secretary Rachel (Virginie Efira who, up until now, has largely played in rom-coms) and worldly translator Philippe (Niels Schneider). Enthralled by his aptitude for language, the romance sends Rachel into a fugue from which she never quite emerges. Philippe, meanwhile, is a philosophy bro who knows (via Nietzsche) what Woman Is About. He hands her Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil on their second date, rhapsodies about her silk skin, corrects her speech and drops anti-Semitic slurs in relation to her Jewish ancestry.
Critics have been quick to comment on Rachel’s ‘inferiority complex’ and naiveté as suspected collateral from her short-lived engagement to her first beau Charlie – who doesn’t appear in the film – suggesting that Corsini consciously downplays any causal link between bad relationships and becoming ‘damaged goods’. There is something deeply unsettling about the logic of this indictment: namely, that Bad Boys make women either blind to or accepting of the worst infractions. Corsini’s placement of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a treatise providing few options for female subjectivity, is purposive. As Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall put it, “Nietzsche has the reputation of being a virulent misogynist, so why are feminists interested in his philosophy?”¹
During a romantic date in the hinterlands Philippe offers a hot take on relationships – there are three distinct categories of love, he says: marital, passion and the inevitable encounter. He invites Rachel to guess which is theirs before edifying her: the inevitable. According to Philippe, this kind of love exists outside of the social order. The scene portends a catalogue of horrors – indeed, Philippe shows an uncanny ability for sermonising women under the guise of ‘opening up’. Post-coital, he tells of a hit-and-run in which a man died and he was sent to prison. “Luckily my father wrote every day… he didn’t judge me.” Beneath this display of vulnerability is an instruction: conditions to be accepted should they continue their relationship. Corsini offsets some of his persona by undercutting its naturalism. Against Philippe’s accoutrements (books, suits and Gauloises), Rachel is unguarded and the interiors she moves through are humble (though always stylish, as production designer Toma Bacqueni ensures).
Though inseparable in the early days of their courtship, distance as dictated by Philippe soon stretches out between them, proscribing the tenor of chasms to come. Rachel’s long waits for Philippe’s visits calls to mind the lover’s losing game described by Barthes: “I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game […] The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”² Following the birth of Chantal (played by three actors, including Estelle Lescure and Jehnny Beth), Rachel’s waiting for Philippe’s maturation has a greater cause; she waits for him to become a father.
Despite the abstractions of Philippe, Rachel encourages the remote idea of him as Chantal’s father, showing her photos of them all together on a rare holiday, bolstered, it seems, by her growing subscription to psychoanalytical principles of a balanced family. He had ‘agreed’ to a child but not a social contract, rejecting a relationship and taking an interest in parenthood only as his daughter reaches interlocutory age, his absence leaving Rachel to juggle work and parenting with a humility that verges on martyrdom. Philippe justifies his neglect with the refrain “it changes nothing”. But unlike the intellectual mismatch of her parents, in time Chantal and Philippe find suit: “I’d have learned so much, living with him” a teenage Chantal muses to her mother. There is, however, a cost to this growing closeness. As weekends with her father turn into longer sojourns in Strasbourg, tension grows between Chantal and Rachel. In a gut-punching conversation which concludes in her doctor suggesting she may be depressed, Rachel grapples with her losses: Philippe offers Chantal the world, whereas she can offer her nothing new.
In Corsini’s queer feminist epic Summertime (2015) co-written with Laurette Polmanss, Delphine is caught between two worlds: the momentum of ‘70s feminist action in Paris where she meets Carole and her closeted country life of Southern France. Both offer something, but one alone cannot offer both. An Impossible Love similarly relies on a provincial-metropolitan dyad to concatenate the distance cleaved by class relations and social immobility. This world-view emphasises the distance between Châteauroux and Paris, but also quixotically squirrels Rachel and Chantal’s domestic life away from the outside world. In contrast to the transient world in which Philippe moves, their home provides a constant. And yet for Rachel, the twin notion of mother and daughter unravels as the outside calls to Chantal in adulthood.
Corsini stays dutifully close to the literature An Impossible Love is adapted from – for readers unfamiliar with the original book, prepare for a ‘spoiler’ or look away now. Angot – who co-wrote Claire Denis’ Let the Sunshine In (2017) – has gained media notoriety in France in part because her book Incest (L’Inceste, 1999) meta-fictionalised an abusive sexual relationship with her father. Public outrage against Angot is telling: calling out those who speak up by suggesting they only wish to court controversy trivialises sexual assault. Corsini’s handling of Angot’s narrative therefore carries the weight of expectation, and her continuity of a literary mode figures perceptively. Corsini plays it safe with the film’s inch-by-inch chronicity, from Rachel and Philippe’s first dance, to the revelation of abuse and its fallout on Chantal and Rachel’s relationship. Yet viewers may be left wondering why Corsini’s shift into the greater interpersonal dynamic between Rachel and Chantal arrives so late, therefore casting the abuse described in the film as a plot twist rather than the main event.
In the end it is Rachel’s handling of abuse that viewers will likely scrutinise. After learning of the violence, she goes to talk to Chantal in her room. She moves around touching things, but says nothing. From this point on, silence solidifies between them with pain flashing in paroxysmal outbursts – the scene of Chantal’s 16th birthday calls to mind the final moments of Carla Simón’s Summer 1993 (2017), in which six-old-Frida’s giggling is replaced by heaving sobs: the grief more voluminous than anything she can articulate. “Two people in a house aren’t a family!” is the most hurtful line Chantal throws at Rachel. And yet, two people in a house also describes the ways in which these two characters grow around and continue to motor alongside each other, perhaps best without the pressure of epithets. Corsini’s ultimate strength with An Impossible Love is that both women find a way to decentralise the architect of harm without tipping into the catharsis of revenge narratives like Kill Bill, Mad Max or the psych-thrills of Elle. Corsini’s ending is refreshing precisely because it understands that finding sustainable ways to live in the wake of trauma aren’t neatly cinched by vengeance (Angot’s book also sidesteps convention). Neither woman needs to ask for a testimony to be repeated: belief is their reprieve.
1 Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall (eds.), ‘Introduction: Why Feminists Read Nietzsche’, in Feminist interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche (Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1998). 2 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (London: Vintage Classics, 2002).
Gabriella Beckhurst is a London-based writer and PhD candidate at the University of York, UK. Their research intersects moving image and photography, life narratives and autoethnography in art and theory, feminist, queer and environmental politics.
