1950s

Rachel is a beautiful 25-year-old girl, an office worker in a small provincial town, from a modest family with Jewish origins.

One evening in a club, Philippe captures her attention, and they begin their relationship.

He belongs to a wealthy bourgeois family, is always traveling, and speaks many languages, including Chinese and Japanese, which he uses for translation work. He is highly cultured, well-versed in art, and has read extensively. Unsure of what to recommend Rachel to read, he starts with "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" and "Beyond Good and Evil" by Nietzsche, almost a sign of what was to come.

A passionate love seems to envelop them until he must return to Paris, and then move to other cities.

The last time they meet, he asks her for a complete relationship, and Rachel becomes pregnant.

Despite letters, urgings, and invitations to meet his daughter, a lot of time passes, and he sees her only during long intervals. Eventually, faced with another request from the mother to recognize the daughter instead of listing her as "father unknown" on documents, Philippe reveals that he has married a very wealthy German woman, allowing him to maintain his social status.

Rachel expels him from her life, and he disappears for a long time. When they meet again, she asks once more for recognition of their daughter. A long night of arguments finally achieves her goal, but it comes at a great cost—an unforeseen, cruel, and demonic price that Rachel and her daughter must pay.

A tumultuous fifty-year story that cannot be defined as a love story.

During their early meetings, Philippe divides love into three categories: marital, passionate, and inevitable encounters, considering passionate love as vulgar.

Theirs was evidently the inevitable encounter, through which he continued to see Rachel whenever it was convenient for him, without changing anything in his own life.

Although Rachel was very aware of her fate with this man, she continued to live calmly with the sole intention that her daughter be recognized by her father.

Nothing could have prepared her for what would happen when Philippe, offering a monthly maintenance check for the daughter, also offered to act as a mentor for the young girl.

One hundred thirty-five minutes of tension, narrated by the daughter, who tells the story up to the final confrontation with the mother, the revelation of hidden events, and the diagnosis of the father, who died of Alzheimer's, possessing a unique, fierce, and criminal existential logic.

A film that turns an intimate affair into a political story, aiming to tell the complexity of relationships with surprising rigor: the female and male perspectives, though not equally tragic, often experience the same tensions.

Rachel, a working, intelligent, and resilient woman, embodies that feminine trait that builds her identity through relationships, reflecting the frustration of the quest for love and the loss of a love object, alien to the world she chose and for which she sacrificed her life.

Philippe is a perverse narcissistic intellectual: under the influence of his grandiose self, he seeks to establish a dependency by making the other feel inadequate; he cannot understand others' emotions because he completely lacks empathy; he feels important, special, and unique; he believes everything is owed to him, and if a request, like Rachel's, goes beyond his intentions, it triggers a mechanism of destructive cruelty; others do not exist to him, and his logic is unstoppable.

One hundred thirty-five minutes of the psychoanalytic session to which this film subjects us; a devastating, unsettling narrative; an incessant journey of frustrating understanding of the far from rational motivations of those who need to destroy to affirm themselves.

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice