“Let Me Go” is an intimate, brittle and somewhat chilly Swiss romance about a 40something single mom who stumbles into her feelings, despite a lifetime of avoiding that trap.
Jeanne Balibar stars as a small town seamstress who takes regular commuter rail visits to a nearby resort for casual lunch pick-ups, sex and small talk.
It’s a bit more than you think.
Claudine bribes the desk clerk (Adrian Sevigny) to find out who’s by himself, and who is due to check out “tomorrow.” She approaches the table of each mark, confidant of her looks — she makes her own dresses as well as many others’ — and appeal, and hits each man up with questions about where he’s from and most importantly, “What’s it like there?” (in French with English subtitles).
She wants details about the street life, neighborhoods and people of Florence, Brighton et al. She doesn’t take notes. But she parrots those details in letters she writes to her 30something special needs son Baptiste (Pierre-Antoine Dubey), telling them they’re from his long-estranged father, who travels for business.
Claudine is a woman of routine — customers, their daughters and granddaughters, age-appropriate outfits for the seniors, a wedding dress when the need arises, train trips and posting letters.
But let’s not leave out the transactional nature of all this. She has sex with these pick-ups. Just a coy-not-coquettish “let’s go to your room,” and she satisfies her urges and his, and in essence compensates each man for his story of where he lives.
Amusingly, the pushy Brit from Brighton (Alex Freeman) doesn’t get to cross that finish line.
But this routine, catering to her Princess Diana and Johnny Logan fan son in the late ’90s, is interrupted by the charming man who picks up her dropped scarf on the aerial tramway up a mountain on one of these treks. The hotel overlooks a lake, and to get to it she walks across a dam.
Michael (Thomas Sarbacher) is a journalist who writes and photographs stories about such hydro projects. Claudine must cope with a guy she’s a bit interested in, someone worthy of more than just her skip-the-preliminaries, avoid the niceties of conversation (“books,” “things in common”) hook-ups.
And that forces her to wrestle with what’s best for her son, who is a tad under-socialized hanging around her home sewing shop, with only elderly sitter Chantal (Véronique Mermoud) there to teach him sonatinas on the piano while Mom’s off collecting another man, another story to send in a letter (no postcards or photos) as this week’s version of his “Dad.” He needs to be in a group home.
Balabar gives the film it’s arms-length iciness, a woman of expectations and routines, shut off from the emotions that led up to a marriage to a man who left her with a disabled son to raise and care for by herself. Claudine is practical and earthy, sexual and businesslike. Letting her feelings figure in the decisions is out-of-cultural-stereotype-character for someone so very Swiss.
The script’s period piece choices are solely based on the need to keep seamstress as a viable livelihood and Princess Diana as a style icon. You’ll know it’s 1998 by the time the big news story of that year crashes into the headlines.
Writer-director Maxime Rappaz had two female co-writers’ help with the script, and it wasn’t enough to give this story warmth, romance and stakes beyond the biff-bam-thankyou-man nature of the “affairs.” Not enough is done to distinguish the German from Hamburg from all the other guys Claudine sleeps with and make their connection special.
But it’s an engrossing character portrait of a woman who has been so on-task for so long that she doesn’t recognize real romance when it shows up and makes her an offer of a better or at least different life, and her struggles with what to do with that.
Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, smoking
Cast: Jeanne Balabar, Pierre-Antoine Dubey, Véronique Mermoud, Adrian Sevigny and Thomas Sarbacher
Credits: Scripted and directed by Maxime Rappaz, with additional script assistance by Marion Vernoux and Florence Seyvos. A Film Movement+ release.
Running time: 1:33
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