'Leaving': Sorrow, angst and a new relationship

Kristin Scott Thomas has a look - a vein tensing on her forehead, sunken blue eyes, down-curled lips - that screams anguish. But it's a quiet, sorrowful scream; the actress simply resonates pain, loss, despair. All she had to do in 2008's I've Loved You So Long - an extraordinary performance - was light a cigarette. She exhaled the hurt in her soul along with the smoke.

In Catherine Corsini's Leaving, Scott Thomas is Suzanne, another unhappy number. Married to a physician (Yvan Attal), with a big, modern house, beautiful artwork, two teenage children, she is nonetheless - and predictably, given the film's title - running on empty. By way of illustration, Corsini cuts to the end-of-the-day bedroom scene: her husband checking his BlackBerry, she, next to him, reading, not really there.

Enter the Spanish construction worker, Ivan (Sergi López, from Pan's Labyrinth and With a Friend Like Harry), hired to clear out a small studio. Ivan is jokey, relaxed - two things Suzanne's spouse is not. In a series of events straight from a Harlequin romance, the doctor's wife and the builder (who isn't menacing at all, despite the fact that he's done jail time) find themselves in his hometown in Catalonia. There's a late-night kiss, and Suzanne's marriage crumbles.

If Leaving begins with a grim prologue (and it does) and plays out with familiar scenarios of infidelity and rage (and it does), Corsini's film turns into something less obvious, and more complicated, in its final chapters. The economic and emotional realities facing Suzanne and Ivan present themselves in painful, humiliating ways, forcing the couple into a corner.

Claude Chabrol, the prolific French filmmaker who specialized in betrayal and jealousy (and who died last month), would have made something nastier, and funnier, out of Leaving. But Corsini has her surprises. And she has Scott Thomas, and that's really all she needs.EndText