92 min | NR | February 5, 2021 | Magnolia Pictures
Two retired women have loved each other for decades from across a hallway, hidden from a family that thinks they are just neighbors. They plan to sell up and move to Rome to live in the open. Then one of them can no longer keep the secret, and the closet turns into a cage.
Madeleine and Nina are two retired women who live across the hall from each other on the top floor of a French apartment building. Their neighbors believe they are friends. They have been lovers for decades, hiding the relationship from Madeleine’s grown children. The plan is to sell the apartments and move to Rome together, where they can finally live in the open. Filippo Meneghetti’s film is about the violence of a closet held shut for a lifetime and the cost of a secret that has metastasized into a way of life.
Barbara Sukowa plays Nina with a coiled fury that never settles. She loves out loud and resents every door that stays closed. Martine Chevallier plays Madeleine as a woman paralyzed by the fear of her own family, unable to say the sentence that would free her. When circumstance forces Nina to fake a role inside Madeleine’s home, Sukowa builds dread out of small domestic gestures. Léa Drucker plays the daughter Anne with a suspicion that curdles slowly, a woman who senses an intruder long before she understands what she is seeing.
Meneghetti directs his first feature like a thriller, and the script he wrote with Malysone Bovorasmy and Florence Vignon withholds information the way a genre film withholds a killer. The camera lives in the threshold between the two apartments. Doorways, peepholes, and the narrow hallway become the geography of the entire film. Aurélien Marra’s cinematography traps the women in frames within frames, watching them through gaps and reflections until proximity itself feels like surveillance. The score by Michele Menini pulls the domestic toward the ominous without ever announcing the shift.
This is a film about how a hidden love does not protect anyone. It corrodes the very thing it claims to keep safe. Meneghetti refuses the easy version where coming out solves the problem, because the problem is the decades already spent in silence. The film holds its two women at arm’s length from the lives they wanted and asks what is left when the door finally opens too late.