French writer-director Diane Kurys turned the trauma of her parents' divorce into an affecting portrait of emotional events spinning out of control in her third directorial effort, Entre Nous. The tale follows two women searching for some relief from their stifling marriages of convenience. Isabelle Huppert stars as Lena, a Belgian Jew (based on Kurys' mother) who marries the man who helped her escape a concentration camp. After WWII, he sets up a successful auto repair shop, but their middle-class existence isn't totally satisfying. At her daughters' school Lena meets another frustrated woman, Madeleine (Miou-Miou), an artist and war widow who married an actor after he got her pregnant. The two bond instantly (the film's French title, Coup de Foudre, means "love at first sight"). Although their closeness is purely emotional, it eventually leads to the end of both marriages, with the children caught in the middle. Kurys called the film "a game of memory." To her, it was a chance to revisit her parents' divorce non-judgmentally and reunite the two, at least on screen. Her mother read the script without realizing it was about her, while her father was moved to tears when he saw the finished film. Kurys shot Entre Nous on the locations where her mother had lived, and she worked tirelessly to find the right props and costumes to recapture her sense of growing up in the early 1950s. The film was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film and brought Kurys the National Academy of Cinema, France Award and the FIPRESCI Prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival.

By Frank Miller