26/06/2013 - Pour une femme is the last chapter in a family autobiography started by Diane Kurys with Coup de Foudre

With her mother recently passed away and a sick father, Anne questions her heritage. Did her parents, who divorced when she was little, ever love each other? Why did they separate? Where is this uncle that was hardly ever spoken about? Her investigation will lead her to find a few answers, but mainly find new questions.

France, 1945, the liberated country is starting to rebuild, just as its people are. Lena and Michel met in the camps and married. As they fight for French nationality, Michel becomes increasingly closer to the Lyon section of the communist party. His wife seems more distant, but they are a happy couple and they start a small clothes company, with the help of the party. One day in 1947, a handsome man knocks on their door. It is Jean, Michel’s brother, who he thought had died in Russia. While Michel wants to believe in the future, family, work and the party, Jean reveals himself to be more sombre. He ruminates on mistakes from the past, to the point of wanting to remedy them, whatever the cost. Despite the love and respect that they have for one another, an ideological as well as sentimental battle erupts between the two brothers, from which neither will be able to emerge victor. Lena, the object and subject of the two brothers’ fighting will have to choose between love and reason.

With Pour une femme [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Diane Kurys has thrown herself in the family investigation genre (like Un secret or Elle s’appelle Sarah, for example), enriched by a large autobiographical component, seen in the film’s code titles, a mixture of photos which trace the director’s path as well as that of her characters. The film is a kind of sum of her previous ones, multiplying allusions. Music by Yves Simon (Diabolo Menthe, Cocktail Molotov) sets the scene for Lena and Michel Korski (La Baule-les-Pins) in a post World War II France (Coup de Foudre) with actors who have already graced some of her previous films (Benoît Magimel in Les Enfants du Siècle, or Sylvie Testud and Denis Poldalydès in Sagan). The film seems to bring, if not her exploration, then at least her childhood autobiography to a close, revealing a baseline quest to find out if she is her father’s daughter. This question, at the centre of the family mythology, even without an answer, seems to put the search to rest.

Similarly to previous films, Diane Kurys has buried herself in historical reconstruction (from the French post-World War II reconstruction or the Mitterrand years), as if to reassure herself with a kind of timelessness which she is unable to find in the present. Anne, the director’s alter ego, is played by Sylvie Testud. In order to bring her heroin to life, Kurys sought out the help of Mélanie Thierry, who joyfully wears clothes from the 1940s. Benoît Magimel recalls, through his tenacity and generosity, Daniel Auteuil. Nicolas Duvauchelle brings density to the role of the dark brother, and Denis Podalydès, Clothilde Hesme and Clément Sibony complete the period cast giving the film a freshness and vivacity compensating for the sometimes rigid historical reconstruction.

(Translated from French)