Winning the Best Director Award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival earlier this year, Nathan Ambrosioni’s Out of Love arrives at this year’s French Film Festival as a touching, quietly piercing gem.

The premise seems simple at first glance. After a long drive on the motorway, Suzanne (Juliette Armanet), a single mother of two, leaves her children Gaspard (Manoã Varvat) and Margaux (Nina Birman) in the care of her estranged sister Jeanne (Camille Cottin). Jeanne works as an insurance assessor and has separated from her partner Nicole (Monia Chokri) after disagreement about whether to have children. Suzanne does not return. There is no call, no message, no explanation, only a letter whose contents are never revealed. Jeanne and the children must learn how to live inside this sudden absence.

Read on paper, Out of Love may not sound like the most daring offering in a festival line up. Many films have built stories around abandoned children or unwilling guardians. What sets Ambrosioni’s film apart is his choice to refuse every easy path the genre offers. He allows the characters to lead, and the story unfolds with an unusual patience and honesty. Cottin’s Jeanne begins the film as someone entirely unprepared to care for children. There are reasons for this. She is guarded, often silent, unwilling to express affection or need. She does not smile easily. She does not cry in front of the people who matter. She resists the idea of taking responsibility for the two children now in her living room. Yet, as the story moves forward, tiny pieces of her interior life come to light: fragments of her family history, the ache of her past relationship and the quiet ways the children unsettle and soften her. Another director might have been tempted to give Jeanne a neat “happy ending” that resolves all her problems in one go. Ambrosioni is wiser. He treats Jeanne as a character with flesh and blood, not a device for the plot. Cottin carries that integrity beautifully, never pushing for tears or melodrama, yet grounding the entire film with her presence.

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