Pierre is a 45-year-old oncologist and in the course of his work he meets Shauna, a beautiful, accomplished and confident 70-year-old woman, now retired after a passionate career as an architect. Costei does not leave the doctor indifferent, and he returns to find her after being called to an emergency.

Fifteen years pass and fate or coincidence leads them to meet again in Ireland where the doctor has gone with a fellow friend.

He remembers her very well while she seems to have no memory of him.

The woman is now living with a neurodegenerative disease, Parkinson's, although she has no obvious symptoms on the surface.

Pierre cannot hide his emotion while she seems frightened: being twenty years older, having silenced her sexuality, sensuality, and desire to fall in love and take risks are Shauna's fears. At times the desire to feel this emotion clashes with illness and the fear of not being able to stand the test: the undeniable allure of a still beautiful woman feeds on the modesty of a body experienced as inadequate for a romance with a man too young for her.

However, Pierre does not want to give up, and his involvement strains his relationship with his extraordinary wife, and family life.

This synopsis may seem surreal-when would a 45-year-old male with a young and beautiful wife fall in love with a mostly sick 70-year-old woman?

It sounds like a story bordering on the plausible, but the film's script succeeds in constructing an extremely reliable path, where all the difficulties that an over-seventy-year-old woman may face with respect to her body and her sensuality come up against the body of a man who is still young and stubborn in loving her and wanting to live with her.

However, Shauna does not intend to give in; her modesty is stronger than any flattery and she wants to live out her freedom of life and death without a man, whatever he is, beside her.

The relationship with her daughter, with her granddaughters, the quotation from a film that made the history of French cinema, the passion that runs and breaks on the Paris-Lyon-Paris line, makes the heart flutter between desire and despair.

Shauna is very strong and terribly fragile, the time that remains must be protected and nurtured; Pierre has much more time ahead but something has happened and happens every day in his life and always confronts him with pain and loss.

An astonishing film, the best representation of the concept of Giacomo Leopardi's poem Amore e Morte: the director gives back a restless work, that of the encounter of love with the dimension of death so long invoked by the great poet in the so-called "cycle of Aspasia": love and death are the only beautiful things the world has, and the only ones worthy of being desired.

Un homme et un femme, they wonder together about their lives, while something incredible happens to both of them: a unique possibility, that of meeting the pain of the body's disintegration, of encountering the experience of death and pausing with it, of living a one space and one time due to an attraction of bodies that are foreign and yet so intimate.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice