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RELEASES Italy

Scott Thomas a new Madame Bovary in Leaving

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The latest film by Catherine Corsini, Leaving [+see also:
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, brings to mind many things: Madame Bovary, for giving into passion to its extreme consequences; Lady Chatterley, because the main characters are a bourgeois woman and a working-class man; and Truffaut’s The Woman Next Door, for the narrative structure that reveals the film’s tragic end in the first scene.

It also draws on feminism, for the main character’s desperate determination to emancipate herself from her oppressive familial and social environment. In the vane hopes that, at 50, she can still reinvent herself in the second half of her life.

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Coming out in Italy on March 5 through Teodora, on approximately 30 screens, Leaving is a story of love and death, a drama that speaks of gilded prisons, irrational desires and ruthless vendettas. It also features three top performances by British actress Kristin Scott Thomas as the fragile and intense wife; France’s Yvan Attal (the husband), who says he was inspired in his role by French Prime Minister François Fillon and a certain kind of materialism; and Spanish actor Sergi Lopez as the sweet and disenchanted lover.

Scott Thomas and Lopez play a well-matched and always credible couple. "Kristin and I are both extroverts who come from completely different plants,” joked the Catalan actor. "We had different approaches to the work and had to find a common, sensual world. It was easy because she’s so intense. Sometimes you feel her shake when she’s acting, which is very stimulating".

Lensed by Agnès Godard (who worked with Corsini on La Nouvelle Eve and Replay) in the warm light of mid-summer, and with music by historical Truffaut collaborators Georges Delerue (Confidentially Yours, The Woman Next Door) and Antoine Duhamel (Mississippi Mermaid), the film suggests that even with her lover the woman’s life will remain a prison.

"I believe very much in determinism, people’s lives are marked by what they do and where they come from", said Corsini. As for the inevitable comparisons with Truffaut, the director, currently working on a new project on guilt, admitted: "I thought a lot about him, he’s one of my favourite directors. But Truffaut is much more literary than I am, he has extraordinary dialogue, which I don’t have".

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(Translated from Italian)

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