An astonishing surprise that neither the poster nor the synopsis of the daughter of a great love do not suggest. We expect to discover a light romantic comedy, with its little twists and turns and its resolution in happy end. This is to misunderstand the narrative precision of Agnès de Sacy. She has worked as a screenwriter on several dozen films and regularly collaborates with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi.
Last year came out Leeward of the Marquesaswhich she wrote, with François Damiens in the lead role. This time as a director, she invited the Belgian to share the screen with Isabelle Carré for her first feature film. The story of two exes who are reunited in a student film by their daughter in a sublime corner of Catalonia.
Like other French filmmakers, Agnès de Sacy places herself in a claimed desire to decentralize the gaze towards the regions, by filming here in the department of her childhood. And film Paris to the strict minimum. The first minutes are certainly set in the capital, but the director chooses to confine the characters in a tight framing. These urban images quickly give way to more open and natural spaces. The scale of the shots suddenly becomes larger, with the protagonists strolling through the Catalan vineyards or walking into a bourgeois house, the epicenter of this reunion story. All this without taking anything away from the intimacy of the dialogues and the accuracy of the interpretations.
Fantastic actors
The actors’ delicate, even cautious performance gives all its emotion to the film. With the radiant Isabelle Carré on one side, both free to move and upset by the unsaid things of her former husband. As for François Damiens, he has been moving towards the dramatic register in recent projects and is gradually erasing his comic expressions and his facial twists.
More measured in his gestures and more subtle in his expressions, the actor reveals admirable skill, delivering a very intelligent reading of his character. Or a man stuck in his job, homosexual, father sensitive to classical music, literature and culture, even if it locks him away from the world and his family.
Like the performers, Agnès de Sacy acts with modesty in her almost naturalistic staging. After a sequence of mise en abyme of the cinematographic image, a bit overwhelming, she turns to simpler effects of fields and reverse shots, effective in this very dialogic whole. This restraint is not surprising when we know that this story is his.
But just because the subject matter is deeply intimate doesn’t mean the scope of this feature isn’t broader. Like Yasujirō Ozu, and that’s saying something, the director strives to dissect the bonds that unite a couple. And the turn of events suggests that the little secrets in the family are part of a greater love.
The Daughter of a Great Loveby Agnès de Sacy, France, 1 h 34, released in theaters on January 8, 2025.
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