With this first naturalist feature film, which follows two noted short films (The Age of Mermaids et Heart side), French filmmaker Héloïse Pelloquet explores female desire through a free woman who chooses to assume hers without guilt, at the risk of losing everything. We are far away, in The passengerin a cliché way Lady Chatterleyin which an idle bourgeois woman becomes infatuated with a young man who can break the torpor of everyday life. With unfailing sincerity, Chiara is a woman fully immersed in “real life”. And who first seeks to flee Maxence to spare Antoine, whom she still loves.
But with the same energy that this woman with a “man’s job” displays at sea when she confronts, with determined gestures, the power of the sea spray, she lets herself be submerged by the wave. Allowing herself to live her love story, the incandescent Chiara gives herself over to it body and soul in a vertigo of joyful sensuality that Cécile de France, filmed unvarnished in a succession of close-ups, magnificently embodies.
The heroine thus frees herself from codes in a double transgression. Because, in addition to adultery, which island morality condemns with fierce violence, the community immediately returning the sinful exile to her status as an afterthought, is added that of her erotic adventure with a very young man.
Not released in Belgian cinemas, The passenger therefore has an authentic character even if, in the end, nothing really surprises, and the way in which this connection unfolds (then is “resolved”) hardly surprises. A beautiful portrait of a woman, predictable but touchingly modern.
