The running coach shows up late for the agreed training session on the beach and doesn’t even have a guilty conscience. He explained to the grumpy-looking actor Laurent that he had just met a ringed plover. Meeting such a rare, endangered species was something special; there was even intense eye contact: “I saw all his journeys in his eyes.” Shortly afterwards, Laurent (Guillaume Canet) has an encounter that points deep into the past and makes him receptive to other experiences.
In French cinema, Stephane Brizé is actually considered a specialist for haunting, documentary-style dramas about labor disputes and the struggle for human dignity – in films like “Strike” (2019) and “Un autre monde” (2021) also with a clearly educational gesture.
In “Between Us, Life,” however, Brizé (in collaboration with the journalist and screenwriter Marie Drucker) takes an ironically distant look at a privileged man who has to contend with completely different things during a spa stay: a particularly sensitive espresso machine, for example , a massager and his most cracked self.
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In the middle of rehearsals for his first appearance on a theater stage, Laurent, who was just titled “The Daring One” in a magazine article, suddenly got cold feet. Which is why he’s now sitting around in his bathrobe in an aseptic, half-abandoned thalazzo center on the west coast of France, reading bad scripts, crying and taking selfies with therapists.
The pitfalls of modern life
News of the film star’s stay quickly spreads and also reaches his former love Alice (Alba Rohrwacher), who lives nearby with her husband and daughter. And so “Life Between Us” develops from the initially comedic look at a crisis-stricken man and the pitfalls of modern life into a flowing, soft and at times wistful drama about life decisions and missed opportunities.
When they meet again for the first time, Laurent and the piano teacher and disabled musician tell each other about their “good” life, their stable relationship, the wonderful child. And once again some of the wise fitness trainer’s truths are confirmed. Didn’t he say that everything revolves around the harmony between the inner and the outer, the shown and the hidden, the sayable and the unsayable?
Alice, who was left by the aspiring actor 15 years ago, soon drops all restraint and speaks feverishly about her wounds: “You destroyed me.” Laurent, who encounters little empathy from his stressed-out wife, has a much harder time with being sincere. What exactly triggers the re-encounter is difficult for both of them to grasp. But one thing is certain: something is happening to them.
The fact that this story, which has been told many times, neither seems tired nor ever seems cheesy is due, on the one hand, to the fine interaction between Alba Rohrwacher and Guillaume Canet, who give their characters space to develop their inner contradictions. On the other hand, the changing tones and the ever-unexpected narrative movements.
In addition to digressions into piping plovers and bird song imitators, the film also takes a detour into documentary form. In a telling video that she sends to Laurent, Alice asks an older friend about her relationship life. After a long-term marriage that hid her desires, she found love with a woman when she was well into her 70s.
The touching confession points to a different space of possibility, but as a “film-within-a-film” it stands entirely on its own. Brizé takes Alice and Laurent seriously, but not too seriously. Two emotionally disturbed people are not the whole world.