MADELEINE COLLINS - Mark Reviews Movies

Madeleine Collins, Greenwich Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 17, 2023

In Switzerland, the woman has a partner and a daughter. In France, the same woman has a husband and two sons. That's the life Judith (Virginie Efira) is living—two homes, two different families, two distinct identities, one complicated mess of lies and mixed emotions and split loyalties. There must be a reason for this decision, and writer/director Antoine Barraud's Madeleine Collins eventually gets at it. What's genuinely fascinating about this low-key study of deception, which becomes more and more akin to a character-based thriller, is how much sympathy Judith elicits, in spite of what she's doing and well before we fully comprehend her motives.

Most of that, of course, is thanks to Efira, who has quickly become one of the most steadfast, consistent, and skilled actors working in film today. Even when confronted with a character as complex and questionable as the one in this film, Efira has the capacity to cut straight to some source of emotional truth, making us want to understand the character she's playing all the more and ensuring that we're with that character all the way through the uncertainty, the doubts, and the suspicion that something is very, very wrong here. On the face of it, obviously, the entire situation looks wrong, but because Efira plays the role with such confidence and believability, something about it has to be right, too, right?

After starting with what seems to be an unrelated prologue—a one-take of a woman (played by Mona Walravens) shopping in a fancy dress store and undergoing a medical crisis—that's still compelling, we catch up with Judith in the middle of her live with Abdel (Quin Gutiérrez). He and Judith are raising a daughter named Ninon (Loïse Benguerel), who clings to Judith and begs her mother to stay when it's time for her to leave the country for work. Abdel himself is having some employment issues at the moment, but Judith supports him without question, even using a contact at the local office of the translation service where she works to find him a temporary job.

Everything looks content, if nothing else, in that house, and maybe that goes toward explaining why Judith spends so much time there. After all, we soon learn that she also has a very comfortable life in France with a husband named Melvil (Bruno Salomone), a very successful orchestra conductor, and two sons, a slightly rebellious teenager (played by Thomas Gloria) and a younger one (played by Théo Deroo), in a lavish Paris apartment.

There's a certain distance, of course, between Judith and Melvil that goes a bit deeper than her constant trips out of country for what she says is on account of work. The relationship doesn't appear hopeless or loveless by any stretch of the imagination—except that we know Judith has that second life, that second home, and that second family.

The mystery of Barraud's screenplay (written in collaboration with Héléna Klotz) is how Judith's double life came to be and why she has invested so much of herself into maintaining something that could be resolved, if not easily, then at least with a tough conversation or two. Is Judith really in love with both men and trying to remain as devoted as she can to all of her children? Is she simply selfish in making all of these people rely on her so much for some deeply psychological reason? Did an affair simply get out of her control, and now, Judith has to maintain these illusions in order to save pain for everyone involved?

There is an answer, and it's almost certainly not what's expected from the setup, even if Barraud has given us all the clues we need from the start and deflects the remaining information we require by some clever but convincing obfuscation in the dialogue. Nothing here seems out of place or contrived, in other words, because the filmmaker establishes the relationships in such clear emotional terms that we don't even notice what they don't say or what words they don't use with each other. The relative comfort of these relationships makes the deceptions—both the one Judith is doing and the one we don't realize Barraud is pulling off until the third act—possible and plausible.

The rest of the film's trickery is accomplished by way of Efira, who lets us see all of the possibilities that might exist within this character while keeping the emotional through line of her performance on just how difficult the deception is for Judith. We know she genuinely loves all of her children, if not in the same way, then certainly equally based on what she knows each kid needs from her.

We can tell Judith has deep affection for both of the men in this love triangle, and there's a subtle hint that a lot of this deception might come from the expectations that each man has for her as a romantic partner. If Judith starts to lose track of her own identity as the story proceeds, how much of that is simply because these bonds have gradually chipped away at whoever she was before forming them?

There's the potential for something much deeper than the film finally presents to us during the third act, which makes the notion of the story as a double-identity thriller a bit too literal in genre terms. Madeleine Collins eventually lets down Judith and Efira by the climax, which reduces the character to a broadly defined muddle of a psychological breakdown, but the combined strength of the narrative and, especially, Efira's work until that point is undeniable.

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