Sep 19

Sep 19 TIFF 2020 film review: 'Passion Simple'

The French drama 'Passion Simple' (an Industry Selects feature playing the 45th Toronto International Film Festival) is the portrait of a woman who keeps romantic love at arm’s length, even if her ephemeral trysts slowly preoccupies more and more of her life.

In short: Single mother Hélène (Laetitia Dosch) falls into an addictive relationship with married Russian diplomat Alexandre, with whom she has nothing in common.

For a film with very meager narrative structure, 'Passion' compels with its harrowing character study of 'the other woman.' Her married 'boyfriend' is barely a character of depth - but this isn't a film about how their infidelity affects his marriage or some broad melodrama about infidelity. This is Hélène's story, firmly rooted in how simply telling someone “I'll call you” can have ruinous consequences if that promise becomes the focal point of their life. Most of the film focuses on how Hélène lives in the lack of her boyfriend - how his absence destabilizes her life, and how his fleeting "dates" seem to preoccupy her thoughts.

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Hélène is simultaneously hopelessly romantic and utterly jaded with the very concept to romantic love. To say she becomes "obsessed" with her dates seems like an overstatement at first - except it's tragic to watch how her fixation slowly, steadily encroaches upon her life as a mother and as a scholar. And the low-key brilliance of 'Passion' is how it doesn’t reduce Hélène or her affair to some caricature. Laetitia Dosch deserves every praise for a gently nuanced performance as a woman slowly spiraling out of control. Lazier films would have reduced Hélène to some broad cartoon of obsession - but it's far more painful to watch her doing otherwise mundane things, like dress shopping or dropping off her son, and see how her primary thought is solely, entirely on Alexandre.

It's frankly heartbreaking to watch Hélène practically run to the phone with excruciating eagerness (on the mere chance it's her married boyfriend calling), hurriedly change out of casual wear into something more alluring - for what amounts to a booty call. Everything about Hélène's relationship with Alexandre is totally one-sided. At one point she muses that such a relationship could be empowering - yet the film makes clear that her intoxication with lover has more control over her than she has control of it.

The film's DNA actually has a lot in common with stories of drug or alcohol addiction. Whereas substance addiction is well-worn ground in storytelling, Hélène's compulsive need for her boyfriend is every bit as corrosive as any intoxicating drug.

P.S. Please give the person who selected the perfectly selected soundtrack an award. Each song is pitch perfect for each moment, impeccably encapsulating in song what Hélène is feeling in that moment.

Final verdict: In the context of an impossible relationship treated as an addiction, 'Passion' becomes a harrowing and empathetic character study of the toxicity of someone on the losing end of a one-sided fling.