Review: Suite Française (15) is beautifully made but covers familiar territory

3 / 5 stars
Suite Française

“IF you want to see what people are truly made of, you start a war.”

Suite FrançaiseSteffan Hill

The acting in Suite Française was brilliant – but perhaps they shouldn't have been speaking English

This observation is made early in Suite Française, a handsome, thoroughly respectable adaptation of the novel by Irène Némirovsky that became a bestseller 60 years after her death in Auschwitz. 

It is a sentiment that runs through this sweeping tale of the Nazi occupation of France and how it brought out the best and the worst in a nation that became prisoners in their own homes. 

The film is narrated by Lucile (Michelle Williams), a young wife in 1940 who lives in Bussy under the suffocating rule of her domineering mother-in-law Madame Angellier (Kristin Scott Thomas). 

The husband she barely knows has gone marching off to war, leaving the women to collect the rents, maintain the family estates and preserve a facade of contented normality. 

Madame treats the arrival of the Nazis as an insufferable inconvenience and refuses to speak to the young lieutenant who is billeted with them. 

You wonder if the whole film might have worked better with everyone speaking in their native tongue

Bruno von Falk (Matthias Schoenaerts) is handsome, considerate and fills the house with soothing piano music he has composed himself. 

It is hardly surprising that the lonely, lovelorn Lucile would at least like to speak to him and learn more about him. 

Suite Française places their impossible love at the heart of the story as Lucile is inevitably drawn towards a man she should consider the enemy. 

It becomes a richer, more interesting story as the full weight of the Nazi presence is felt in the town. 

The wealthy and privileged, such as Viscount Montmort (Lambert Wilson) and his wife (Harriet Walter), attempt to maintain their position in society. 

The poor, such as farmer Benoit (Sam Riley) and his wife Madeleine (Ruth Wilson), are increasingly drawn to defiance and acts of resistance. 

Lucile is left to discover where she stands in the swirl of patriotic feeling and personal heartache. 

Everyone in Suite Française speaks English, although the radio broadcasts and songs are in French and some of the Nazis speak in German. 

You wonder if the whole film might have worked better with everyone speaking in their native tongue. 

It just feels as if a little of the life and passion have been squeezed out of it which is no fault of a very good cast. 

SUITE FRANÇAISE - OFFICIAL TRAILER [HD]

Scott Thomas appears to be very much cast to type as Angellier, a woman with the look of the Wicked Witch of the West and an equally fierce manner to accompany it. 

But over the course of the film she is revealed as a more complex, sympathetic figure with the heart a lion. 

By contrast Schoenaerts is cast against type as the sensitive Bruno, appalled by the arrogance of his fellow officers and obliged to declare: “I have nothing in common with these people.” 

The always reliable Michelle Williams makes Lucile a warm, believable figure. 

In the closing sequences, as Lucile takes sides and takes action, Suite Française gathers momentum and finds an emotional pull, even evoking echoes of the Bogart/Bergman classic Casablanca. 

That’s not a bad achievement for a film that covers such familiar territory. 

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