What’s the point? When did she realize she would be a writer? This was done in three stages. There was the day he was born, the day he was given an old machine whose “P” key got stuck. And the third? It’s a secret. Between the lines is the story of this secret. It goes back to March 30, 1924. Jane was working as a servant for the Nivens in Berkshire. For Mother’s Day, these aristocrats had given her the day off. They had a picnic with friends by the river. Jane takes the opportunity to rush off to join the neighbors’ son in his nearby mansion. Paul is looking forward to it. Their affair must remain confidential.
Between them, things don’t drag on. Head to the bedroom on the first floor. Naked bodies wrap themselves in white sheets. It’s a farewell. They know that. They blame themselves. In eleven days, Paul is getting married. He will marry a woman of his rank, become a lawyer. We saw him abandon his law textbook to grab the young lady in his arms. He will go English style: he too is invited to lunch on the grass. His fiancée will be there. She is used to his delays. The ladies wear hats. Champagne is served in crystal. Conversations carefully avoid the subject of war: everyone has lost someone in the trenches.
Meanwhile, sweet, pale Jane walks around the empty house naked. She stops in front of the portraits of ancestors, lingers in the library where she caresses the edges of the leather-bound books with a finger, breathes in the scent of the flowers in the vases. In the kitchen, she devours pâté en croute, drinks a beer from the bottle, lights a cigarette with undisguised pleasure. She better savor these moments. She will never forget them.
What happened to Eva Husson? The Frenchwoman had gotten bored with teenage gang bangers and had followed in the footsteps of female fighters in Kurdistan. Here she sets foot with incredible delicacy in a lawned Britain, adapting a novel by Graham Swift. The film is luminously sensual. There floats in these careful images an intense feeling of loss, the imminence of danger. We feel the birth of a vocation, the tremor of a world that is fleeing, of audacity and transgression.
Remorse is a big thing. It produces tears and novels. Later, Jane will be a novelist, living with a philosopher supporting her in her efforts. We will see her at the end of her life welcoming the news of a prestigious prize with the same indifference as Doris Lessing learning that she had just received the Nobel (last appearance of the immense Glenda Jackson on a screen).
These graceful arabesques are magnified by an extraordinary distribution. Colin Firth, whom the death of a son has turned inside out, displays a very tweedy pain. Olivia Colman seethes with suppressed rage (you have to hear her explain to Jane how lucky she is to be an orphan). Josh O’Connor (Prince Charles from The Crown) has the required mixture of arrogance and cowardice. And then there is Odessa Young, the revelation.
She listens to table conversations in a maid’s uniform, gets on her bicycle in a red coat, rushes towards her destiny by pedaling like a madwoman on soggy paths, dares the long sequence in the simplest device. She is redheaded, vibrant, radiant like a heroine from Ouvert la nuit. There is something dreamy and ethereal about it. At Cannes, in 2021, the only reason why she did not win the acting prize is that Between the Lines appeared in the Cannes Première section, and not in competition. Another aberration, why did Eva Husson’s film take so long to come out?
The Note of Figaro: 3/4
