... but that, I'm afraid, is as close as we get to Virginia Woolf in this story of closed communities and acceptance of outsiders. Gregori Derangere, so good in Bon Voyage, is rewarded with another central role as the etranger who comes to the rugged, inhospitable (in more ways than one) Brittany community to work in the local lighthouse. Set in the sixties the story is told in flashback hung on the peg of a daughter who has returned to her roots to sell the house she lived in as a child and remembers the stranger/catalyst and the conflicts he triggered. Sandrine Bonnaire is on hand as the married woman destined to strike sparks off and with Derangere and it's refreshing that when they do, inevitably, get it on they do so out of doors in daylight - against a wall in fact - whilst the Bastille Day celebrations go on around them. Given that Bonnaire is married to Derangere's colleague, Phillippe Torreton it does tend to put the master bedroom out of bounds and the scene - the one and only time they have sex - reveals no tenderness or finer feelings, merely lust that nevertheless produced the girl through whose memories the story is filtered. Not perhaps to everyone's taste it is, nevertheless, a fine effort, made entirely on location and none the worse for it.
Review of The Light
