Winter’s Child

Bergmanesque in spirit and temperature, Assayas’s melodrama is the second part of an informal trilogy flanked by his debut film, Disorder and Paris Awakens. These monochromatic films focus on the theme of coming of age as a rite of passage. In Winter's Child, we see this in the process of becoming a father and abandoning the role of son. Entangled in a love quadrangle, the protagonists—egocentric and blind to reality—are tossed around on a wave of extreme emotions. A beginning architect named Stephane abandons Nathalie, who is pregnant, for a set designer named Sabine. The latter, however, is entangled in a toxic, erotic relationship with a certain actor. While Stephane follows Sabine on the road with her theater troupe, Nathalie attempts suicide. The violent emotions are cooled in Winter's Child by artistic formalism. Focused on faces and building around the characters a tightly wound world resembling a prison or a trap, Assayas’s film is primarily about actors. But the lesson from Bergman that he studies in the film is about more than his style of working with the cast: What I learned from Bergman,” he says in a conversation with The Guardian, “is that you can explore human relationships with a certain level of brutality and crudity as long as you love your characters.