Christine Corsini's Partir | Leaving (2009)

Suzanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) is a former physiotherapist married to surgeon Samuel (Yvan Attal) with their two teenaged children. She is approaching fifty and for twenty years has been a housewife and mother to the couple's children. The real action begins when she meets Ivan (Sergi López) who is involved in building being carried out on the house.

Corsini had noted that in the cinema it's usually the man who leaves the house, but wanted to show it from the a female perspective. Quite quickly Suzanne becomes attracted to Ivan, a man of Spanish origin who lives in a very modest flat. It's in this flat that Suzanne discovers a sexual passion that's completely new to her, and she becomes so obsessed with her relationship that she moves in with Ivan.

Samuel handles the affair very badly and reacts with anger and violence. He cancels her access to the bank with the intention of making it impossible for the couple to survive economically, although for a time they strive to pull through. But when Suzanne discovers that Samuel is away for several days she and Ivan remove paintings and other valuables from the house, resulting in Samuel getting Ivan arrested for theft.

There has, of course, always been a double sexual standard, and when Suzanne is forced by economical survival to return to the family fold it appears that he has won. Samuel's sexual performance is not just automatic though: it looks more like rape, and all his attempts to pull the family back together backfire on him when Suzanne shoots at his heart when he's in post-coital sleep.