A Couple

In Un couple (2023), Éliette Abécassis offers a love story told in reverse. Alice and Jules have shared their lives for sixty years; sitting on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, on the threshold of their nineties, they become the starting point of a narrative that runs back through time. Step by step, the novelist unspools the film of their story backwards — old age and routine, then reunions, falling out of love, jealousy, the children, the marriage, and at last the passion of the beginning. As the decades come undone, the backdrop moves through the age of social media, the fall of the Berlin Wall, May 1968, the Algerian War. From this literary tour de force emerges the portrait of a love that endures against all odds, and a luminous meditation on the passing of time — an antidote to the cynicism and loneliness of our era.