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Stéphane Brizé’s exquisitely executed Mademoiselle Chambon is a film about the possible. What is possible is an affair between a schoolteacher and a builder. Both are in their middleyears and live in a small French town. The teacher (Sandrine Kiberlain), however, is from Paris and the upper regions of the middle class. She is culturally refined, reads great books, collects art, plays the violin, and seems too sophisticated to get tied up in something as mundane as a marriage. The builder (Vincent Lindon) has no culture whatsoever. His life is about fixing, breaking, and making things. After work, he brings home the bacon. One day, his wife (Aure Atika) hurts her back while working at the local factory and he has to pick up his son from school on the way home. He arrives, and he sees his son’s teacher: her slender back, the curve of her ass on the desk, the sunlight on her dress. She turns and looks at him. Their eyes connect. The affair becomes possible.

The story is simple and elegant. The builder’s marriage is not on the rocks. His life is in perfect order. His boy is happy. The boy is deeply loved by both parents. And the small family lives in a charming house that has a charming garden. When the builder wants to be alone for a moment, he drives to a windy bluff and stares at the distance—town, hills, trees, clouds, sky, the infinite. The only problem in the builder’s little world is death. It has claimed his mother and is soon to claim his father, who is turning 80 and is also a builder. One day, father and son shop for a coffin. The old man can’t decide which one to buy.

Because the marriage is sound, there’s no ground of possibility for the affair. It appears out of the thinnest air. One moment, the builder is smashing down a wall of a house he and three others are renovating; the next moment, he finds himself falling in love. Indeed, when he first sees the teacher (her back, ass, dress) in the classroom, his eyes have the expression of someone who has just been pushed off a cliff by some invisible, unknown force (a gust of wind or a virtual particle expanding from the ether). During his second visit to the school, the teacher asks him to speak to her class about what he does for a living. He presents little resistance to this seemingly innocent request.

Everything about Vincent Lindon’s body (its average bulk, the standard width of the shoulders, the regular roundness of the belly) and face (eyes that have no mystery, mouth that rarely moves, hair that’s barely combed) communicates the solidity, certainty, and honesty of a working-class man. When the students in his son’s class ask him about his work, the builder does not offer deep answers but explains directly what his work is about—how a home is built, what he uses to build things, how he got started as a builder. At the end of the session, one of the many inquisitive kids asks a question that seems simple but is actually philosophical: How long does he expect a house he has built to last? “Forever,” he answers plainly.

The possibility of the affair almost becomes real at the teacher’s apartment. She has hired him to fix a drafty window. Once the job is done, she offers him tea and light talk about her past. He notices her violin and asks her to play a tune for him. She says no; he insists. She relents and performs with her back turned to him. She plays something sad and beautiful. The builder’s heart breaks into a thousand pieces. You can see it in his eyes; he has been exposed to the greatness of art, culture, refinement. The two kind of kiss but stop. He leaves her apartment, on fire. Later, we see him on the bluff, looking at the distance, at infinity. The trees around him are wind-wild. Those trees are, of course, the condition of his soul.

The greatness of the film is that the romance never leaves the realm of the possible. At any moment of the movie, it could happen, but it doesn’t. He could start a new life with her, but he doesn’t. The teacher could stay in the town and be a mistress, but she doesn’t. As a result, the two end not with a memory of a past passion but with a memory of its future, of a
passion that could have been but never was.