Review of Before the Winter Chill (2013) by Norman F — 10 May 2014

There comes a point in Before The Winter Chill when the respected neurosurgeon Paul (Daniel Auteuil) stands frozen with trembling hands over the exposed brain of a patient. After years of walking through his life he is burnt out, no longer able to grasp his own reality. Paul is in the autumn of his life - a recurring metaphor that runs from the film's title to the orange foliage around his sleek modern home. The days of excitement and adventure are behind him. He is cast adrift in his own life, sleepwalking through his marriage and friendships - "It goes by so fast, no time to brake".

A man in possession of the perfect life, Paul is wealthy, lives in a minimalist country house with his loving wife Lucie (Kristin Scott Thomas) and is at the height of his profession - but a sudden moment of clarity fills him with resentment for Lucie and everything about his wasted, idyllic years. This abrupt realisation is sparked by a chance encounter with a young barmaid who claims Paul operated on her as a child and appears determined to show her belated gratitude. Receiving endless bunches of roses with the ominous air of death threats about them, Paul is jolted from his autumnal stupor to embrace this new mysterious excitement. Lucie begins to suspect Paul is having an affair, but the ugly truth is far darker.

The film gradually layers its mystery under a deathly calm, with events so motionless and silent there is barely wind in the trees. This creeping sedation and overriding melancholia are absorbing up to a point, but for all its slow burn Before The Winter Chill isn't able to amount to much either narratively or emotionally. After solid work establishing the detachment of Paul from his own life, the film suffers much the same fate - leaving us detached and uninvolved.

Two parts domestic drama, one part thriller, there is a certain disharmony between the tones that is never fully resolved. The performances from Auteuil and Scott Thomas are both strong, and imbue their marital hostility with a believable vitriol - but set against Paul's blacker discoveries in the final act both portions fall slightly flat. A fairly heavy-handed repeated motif of Puccini's La Boheme - which hints at the operatic grief Paul is to suffer in the pursuit of youth - provides a degree of diversion, giving proceedings a taste of peril that is otherwise largely absent.

During a single viewing of Before The Winter Chill there is plenty of pleasure to be found in the icy atmosphere and the slow wind of mysteries becoming taut - but as it draws to a close in a haze of contrived inconsequence there is plainly very little here to dwell upon. It passes the memory by as inconspicuously as Paul's latter years.