Alcide has been raising his two sons alone since the death of his wife, who died of illness four years earlier. A fisherman, he decides to stop sailing to be near his boys and takes over a small oyster farm. His meeting with Laura, a divorced mother, freshly arrived from Paris, seems providential. Their children get along wonderfully. A painter in her spare time, the luminous Laura brings a flurry of fantasy and sensuality into the house facing the sea, becalmed by the memory of the deceased. But soon, the tide turns and Laura reveals another face.
Alternating past and present, where the memory of Laura comes back to haunt an aging and sick Alcide, Buckshot describes the imperceptible slide towards disenchantment, the gap that widens between the two lovers, played intensely by Élodie Bouchez, draped in long velvet dresses at the end of the 19th centurye century, and the Iranian Rafi Pitts, with a penetrating gaze, sometimes gentle, sometimes bubbling with dull anger.
mystery and lyricism
Like a romantic heroine, Laura wants to make their love story a work of art when all he longs for is peace. Despising a “life at ground level”, she criticizes the children for their conformity and their mediocrity, Alcide for his boorish friends and his cowardice. “Laura had the words to hurt, Swiss army knife words that opened the heart”, writes Éric Fottorino in the powerful novel that inspired the TV movie.
→ CRITICAL. “You only want me”: the sickness of love
If the book adopts the point of view of Alcide, a giant with feet of clay facing a manipulative “woman-hurricane”, the filmmaker Laetitia Masson rebalances the story by letting Laura express her suffering through a new character. , a wise confidante played by Aurore Clément. Cradled by the music of Bruno Coulais and the songs of Jean-Louis Murat, the staging of this destructive passion is tinged with mystery and lyricism, sublimating the wild landscapes of Trégor, in northern Brittany.