Mathieu is a famous actor in professional crisis.

He leaves his first theatrical set abruptly, not feeling up to meeting the public.

He arrives at a deluxe thalassotherapy hotel and anxiously awaits calls from his wife, who underestimates his condition, is hurried, immersed in work, and invites him to read the three scripts he has received.

Although stopped and acknowledged by hotel guests Mathieu likes to be alone even though he does not know how to spend his time and plays like a child with the remote control that repeatedly opens and closes the door between the sleeping and living areas of his suite.

He is taken aback by the description of his encounter with a very rare, endangered bird that the trainer subjects him to as soon as he meets it on the beach.

Most amusingly and awkwardly, he tries to make coffee in his room using the futuristic machine at his disposal, which does not even require touch but operates through a sensor that initially does not work but then once activated continues to brew coffee without stopping..

He receives a letter from the front desk: a woman writes to him with whom he had an affair some 15 years earlier and who now lives with her husband and children in the seaside resort in western France where his hotel is located.

They meet; she still loves him; he had left her, disoriented and broken. Something rekindles between the two, who spend a few pleasant and unusual evenings together; soon he must leave again.

Some regrets, sense of loneliness and failure as well as laughter especially at the restaurant where they serve very fresh fish killed only just before being served at the table: a scene beyond grotesque.

After the trilogy on the world of work, alienation and the law of the market Brizè returns to investigate ordinary feelings, passions and the meaning of choices and life.

Mathieu, though famous, is very confused and disoriented, perhaps just "out of season"; Alice, the woman who has always been in love with him, appears much more resolute and determined, though the "high season" of her love for him now seems pragmatically compromised.

Disillusionment in the face of the course of life regardless of one's desires, choices, and proclivities seems to be the focal point of Brizè's sophisticated film: giving an account midway through one's existential journey can be extremely painful.

Irony is never lacking, and neither is disillusionment: protecting oneself on the one hand and exposing oneself on the other to the vertigo of emotions and the unpredictable seems incumbent.

Those who have suffered the most nevertheless seem more lucid than those who have had a seemingly easier and glorious life pausing now in the opacity and confusion of those who find themselves perhaps for the first time in existential meaninglessness.

Life has gone a certain way and one has to take note of it albeit in the face of the trap of nostalgia, the vertigo of banality and the precariousness of existence.

I wanted to dwell on the moment when we mull over the choices never made, or made wrongly, the encounters missed or wasted, the doors never opened, the dates failed, the moments in life when we decided to take one path instead of another. Secret, haunting questions that we all ask ourselves, powerful or not, known or unknown, men and women, says Stèphane Brizè.

It is difficult to recognize a consonance between actions, choices and possibilities: we do not know if life is "out of season" for us or if we are the ones who are always "out of season" for life.

On the other hand, the irreconcilable estrangement between the randomness of existence and the dimension of the individual seems inevitable.

12-Sep-2023 by Beatrice