UNFORGIVABLE aka Impardonnables

Francis an elderly successful French crime novelist needs some peace and quiet to get past his writers block and finish his latest book and so is touring Real Estate Brokers in Venice to find a suitable bolt-hole. In his search he meets Judith an attractive French ex-pat who declares that she has the perfect spot for him in an isolated house on the island of Saint Erasmo. She is right, the place on the water is ideal and he tells her that if he will take it if she will agree to move in with him.  As she is a good decade younger and has acted imperviously to all his heavy handed flirting so far, its quite a shock to discover as the action leaps forward 18 moths, that she not only has agreed but even married him too.

It appears that Judith is the sort of woman that everyone falls in love with as evident with both her ex lover Anna Marie who is a Private Investigator and her 20 something-year-old son Jeremie who has just been released from prison. Jeremie with his phobia of being touched (!) only really enters her life after a paranoid Francis acting like a character out of his own novels employs him to spy on Judith as he is convinced she is being unfaithful with a market gardener. Not the best move for a cuckold husband to make.

And then this multi-layered plot starts to get even more complicated with the arrival of Francis's adult daughter Alice and her very miserable teenage daughter Vicky.  Before she has barely unpacked her bags, Alice ups and takes a ferry to the City and completely disappears and Francis is forced to employ Anna Maria's services to successfully track her down in the arms of the handsome son of an impoverished Countess whose family are peddling drugs to make ends meet.

Why Alice neglects her own daughter so cruelly seems like history repeating itself as Francis was never that keen at hanging around and playing happy families when she was a tot.

Despite all its many plot strands (or maybe because of them?) there is something quite compelling (besides all the lush stunning views of Venice) about this intense drama written & directed by the veteran French filmmaker  André Téchiné ('Wild Reeds' 'My Favorite Season').   He certainly has a skill in both humanising all these scenarios and engaging us completely even when things do not always end up as they should have.  He was served well by his cast led by André Dussollier ('Amelie') as Francis, and playing the love of everyone's life Judith was Carole Bouquet who I was shocked to discover that in a another life had been a Bond Girl back when Roger Moore was 007!

Very entertaining.

Available via Amazon

★★★★★★★