Director Catherine Breillat (above) made Brève traversée ten years ago. It succeeded well as fodder to serve my own spontaneous, persistent and somewhat inexplicable taste for more-or-less serious but also more-or-less commercial French movies filled with performers I know little or nothing about acting out stories of tangled intimacy in worlds of their own that I also know little or nothing about.
For me there was more genuine surprise in this two-person drama than I would ordinarily expect. It had the kind of plot that any number of clever writers could think up, but that very few could follow through with satisfactorily, sustaining tension right up to the end and then at the last possible minute bringing the story home to the characters in a natural, inevitable-seeming way without contrivance.
The admirable and hard-working stars were Gilles Guillain and Sarah Pratt.