Can lovers reunited on Brittany beaches find each other again?

Former lovers in new French film Out of Season must weight the risks of a reunion against the separate lives they have created.

Laurent (Guillaume Canet) and Alice (Alba Rohrwacher) walk on the beach in Out of Season.

The French drama Out of Season, directed and co-written by Stephane Brize, is a thought-provoking exploration of the idea of true love.

It centres on Laurent (Guillaume Canet), a French movie star on the cusp of 50, and Alice (Alba Rohrwacher), a piano teacher in her 40s.

They were lovers 16 years ago. They broke up and each are now married: she to a doctor, he to a television news anchor. She has a 16-year-old daughter; he has an 11-year-old son.

They reconnect when he, in a self-imposed career crisis, leaves Paris and checks into a spa in the quiet seaside town she calls home. He does not know she lives there. She, however, does know he is in town and makes contact. “Someone like you in a place like this. Everyone knows.”

When they first met, he was not as famous as he is today. She tells him their break-up “left me in ruins” but was not surprising. “Why would you stay with a nobody like me?” He disputes this.

She makes it plain that he left her. That she lost a true love. Yet it’s not as straightforward as that.

His professional meltdown ostensibly is because he has pulled out of doing his first stage play due to a fear he will fail.

In the spa, he breaks down and cries. Is this only over the play? Is it an emotional response to him feeling like an impostor, a movie actor who can’t take the stage, or is it something deeper and older than that?

As the former lovers meet and talk, there’s a feeling that each is regretting, perhaps mourning, an absence in their lives.

“All is well,’’ Laurent says of his life. “And all is not well.” Alice suggests their break-up “was meant to be”, but that’s her brain speaking, not her heart.

The strengths of this film are the performances, especially from the Italian actor Rohrwacher (her character is Italian, too, and Alice and Laurent share tender jokes about her French ­language skills), the dialogue (the co-scriptwriter is Marie Drucker) and the cinematography (Antoine Heberle), particularly on the isolated beaches of Brittany.

The scene where they meet, for the first time in 16 years, is brilliantly handled. They are in a tea shop. They are nervous. They make silly jokes about each other in an attempt to act with casual poise. Yet the fact the jokes exist, and that they remember them, suggests an indelible history.

Later they dance at a wedding. This is beautiful scene. They hold each other close. She caresses the back of his neck. Her husband is away. Where will this lead? It does lead somewhere. To a place on which viewers will have different ­opinions.

In a magazine interview published before he quit the play, Laurent declares “I can’t imagine a life without taking risks”. That is the question he and Alice must face as their past infuses with their present and they grapple with their shown lives and their hidden lives.

Out of Season (M)

French language with English subtitles
116 minutes
In cinemas

★★★½