"If music be the food of love, play on" becomes achingly real in the exquisite "Mademoiselle Chambon." The hero, Jean (Vincent Lindon), a small-town French builder and family man, falls into headlong infatuation when he hears his young son's schoolteacher, Veronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain), play a classical violin piece.
He has already sparked to her unaffected intelligence and elegance, just as she has been drawn to his sturdiness and warmth, and even to his honest craftsmanship. But when he listens to her play, he's a goner. And when the two sit close and drink in a beautiful CD, they share an aesthetic flight, and fall into each other's arms. In the classic of this form, David Lean's "Brief Encounter," the sincere, attractive lovers go only that far. Whether Jean and Chambon will go further gives "Mademoiselle Chambon" the kind of suspense that illuminates the characters.
The comical aristocrat in "Twelfth Night" who called music the food of love wanted "excess of it" to be sickened of it. That's not an option open to Jean. All his life, he has welcomed the responsibilities that now hem him in. He's devoted to his father (who handed down his trade to him) as well as to his wife and son; he brings an artisan's care to every job. Chambon is in many ways his opposite. She has made a career of one-year appointments to schools all over France. She comes from a complicated and ambitious haute-bourgeois family and carries baggage from lost musical ambition. She admires Jean partly for qualities that their love affair might destroy.
The writer-director, Stephane Brize, uses the music to bring audiences inside the characters' heads. He uses his actors to keep us there even when the screen goes totally silent. The solid Lindon and the sylph-like Kiberlain counterpoint each other as performers the way Jean and Chambon do as characters. He works with broad, true strokes. She creates a poignant figure from fine bits of emotion that issue from her eyes like delicate flares. But these two aren't the whole show. As Jean's wife, Aure Atika creates a woman with rugged instincts. She may not be subtle. But she can sense when her husband has strayed in his mind. In "Mademoiselle Chambon," only the scale is modest. The emotional stakes are sky-high.
MPAA rating: Unrated (with one scene of lovemaking)
Cast: Vincent Lindon (Jean); Sandrine Kiberlain (Veronique Chambon); Aure Atika (Anne-Marie); (Jean-Marc Thibault (Jean's father); Arthur Le Houerou (Jeremy)
Credits: Directed by Stephane Brize; written by Brize and Florence Vignon, from Eric Holder's novel; produced by Milena Poylo and Gilles Sacuto. A Lorber release. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 101 minutes