La femme de Gilles

Set in one of those sleepy hamlets burbling with underground rivers of molten feeling, the French drama "Gilles's Wife" opens with a man returning home and rousing his sleeping wife first to consciousness, then to passion. The man is Gilles (Clovis Cornillac), a provider with the fleshy round face of a baby, who dutifully trudges with antlike constancy between his home and the mine in which he works. Not until this pacific world comes undone by those molten passions do we hear the name of Gilles's wife, a woman whose steady smile speaks to a well-ordered life organized around her beautiful children, her tidy home and, most important, the husband who serves as her sun. The woman, the wife and the mother is Elisa, and she is played by the fascinating French actress Emmanuelle Devos. Ms. Devos has softly blurred features and a smile as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa's. The story is simplicity itself: Elisa, as if waking from a dream, slowly realizes that Gilles has developed a passion for another woman. The director of "Gilles's Wife" is Frédéric Fonteyne, whose best-known film is a slight entertainment called "A Pornographic Affair" that, much like this work, has an appealing surface beauty and an equally shallow mystery. — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times