Avant l'hiver is a charming European film driven by its complex historical subtext revealed gradually by small details of everyday life and by wonderful performances by great actors in 'small', intimate roles in which they asked to convey deeply-felt emotions while staying firmly within the social and moral limits of staid bourgeois lives. This is European film-making at its best, with intelligent people exploring what it means to be settled, successful and bourgeois. But their angst is not about grubbing for money, power and status while losing one's soul, we soon find out. Paul (Daniel Auteuil) is a long-married neurosurgeon married to Lucie (Kristin Scott-Thomas). He begins to receive anonymous bouquets of flowers at work and at home. He suspects a young woman, Lou (Leila Bekhti), who works at his local bistro. Several confrontations occur: in the street, at a florist. She denies everything. It seems inconsequential till Paul sees Lou working the streets as a prostitute around the stadium. He slowly becomes obsessed with her, even breaking into his best friend's Gérard's office, a psychiatrist who Lou is seeing, to find her address. Paul and Lou meet several times. Paul is not interested in sex. Nor is he interested in love; this is not an affair. He hungers more for her past, for her story of how she came to be what she is. Slowly, we learn that she is a French-Algerian raised in France but estranged from her self-centered parents. Paul is drawn to the narrative of her past struggles to find herself. She even at one point reveals that she does work occasionally as a prostitute, who only becomes more intrigued as he comes to see that her complicated present is the natural outcome of her complicated past. Unlike him, Lou is apparently more true to herself despite being on the low end of the social scale: she is a barmaid, a student, a prostitute (or so it seems). He is the alienated one, despite success and a beautiful wife who still loves him. We slowly piece together Paul's hunger for the past through a series of little episodes. The night before he is to operate an old woman, she reveals that she is the sole survivor of a family exterminated by the Holocaust, the daughter of refugee Polish parents who fled to France before the war but who were nonetheless sent to the death camps. She recites the names of her parents, brothers and sister, stating that if she does not survive the operation she wants at least one person to know that these people existed. The next day, he freezes during the delicate operation and is saved by his assistant, who takes over. In another pivotal scene, Paul argues with his best friend Gérard, who reveals what everyone knows: for thirty years Gérard has been in love with Lucie, Paul's wife. We learn that all three met at the same time, but we deduce that Lucie chose Paul while staying close friends with Gérard. There is never a hint of impropriety in their relationship, except one: when Paul breaks into his friend's office to find Lou's address, he finds an old photo of him, his wife and their son. Why does Gérard have this in his desk drawer? He gains access to Gérard's computer by using his son's name. Is the estranged son (Victor) really Gérard's? It seems unlikely, since Lucie is morally upright and supportive of her husband Paul despite his emotional crisis. Later, Gérard tells Paul that if he had one chance to lead his life over, it would be with Lucie. We deduce that Gérard wishes Victor were his son and not Paul's. These plot points, however, are not really about love and success, which could be explored in any intelligent American film analysing professional success and emotional failure. Here, everything pivots on the past and its role in the present. Paul, we learn, is not emotionally distant because of overwork or because he still has a teenage hormonal outlook on women (he never strays sexually from his wife, and when Lou blatantly offers to have sex, he is repulsed by her coarse language, not by the proposition). He is emotionally disconnected to those around him because he in a sense has no past. We learn that Paul is the son of an American soldier temporarily stationed in France who abandoned the family. Paul is essentially an orphan, a foreigner, a bastard, a self-made man who has created a present by hard work that, we learn, never left him enough time to connect to his own family. We also learn that Lou desperately tries to establish her real roots when Paul tracks her down (her name, history, and status as an art history student are all false). In a poignant scene, she insists he listen to an old tape of her mother singing a childhood ditty in French and Arabic. She gives him the tape, asks him to leave and, we learn later, commits suicide. We learn later that she too was an orphan, though a murderous one who sought out lonely and vulnerable men such as Paul to exploit and kill them. Finally, when the old woman survives the operation, Paul recites back to her the names of her murdered family. He smiles, he remembers. He finally has a past, after losing Lou's. The problem, though, is that it is not his. He escapes from a family barbecue to listen to Lou's tape. This I think is the major theme in the film. People who cannot connect to the past cannot live in the present, as the old woman whose past was stolen from her realises. As much as Paul cannot claim his own past, he hungers for other people's stories: he remembers the old patient's story; he is touched by Lou's fictive past; he is curiously attracted to nature and its rhythms of death and rebirth. All in all, a thoughtful film with wonderful actors, script and camera work.
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