Connemara
A quiet melancholy envelops Connemara, Alex Lutz’s gentle yet sharp-eyed adaptation of Nicolas Mathieu’s novel – a story about two former classmates who collide in middle age, not through fate or longing, but through the slow pull of place, memory and the quiet decisions that shape a life. Set in the hazy hills of the Vosges, this is less a romance than a meditation on who stays, who leaves, and what it costs each of them.
Hélène (Mélanie Thierry), an exhausted professional working in Paris, returns to her childhood town after burning out – brittle, bruised and uncertain of what she’s even looking for. What she finds is Christophe (Bastien Bouillon), the high school hockey star she once adored. Now playing for the local team, Christophe never left the small town – and, more importantly, never tried to. His room, cluttered with the remnants of a teenage life half-lived, isn’t nostalgic; it’s the evidence of a man who never imagined himself elsewhere.
The brilliance of Connemara lies in the way it lays this social divide bare – not with judgement, but with gentle clarity. The film never chastises Christophe for staying; on the contrary, his stasis carries a quiet serenity. In a culture obsessed with leaving, climbing and escaping, Lutz suggests that staying can be a conscious, valid act. Christophe and Hélène’s chemistry is delicate and unforced, with Bouillon and Thierry moving in a rhythm that feels cautious yet natural.
The film occasionally falters in its pacing – Lutz allows it to drift, and at times the plot seems to evaporate altogether – but this is salvaged by the intuitive flair of the performances. The final act lingers with eerie clarity: a wedding parlour game in which Hélène is chosen for a ritual where a blindfolded groom must identify his bride by touching the legs of several women. What begins as light farce curdles into something humiliating and faintly grotesque – played with the dread and discomfort of a horror film’s climax.
In the end, Connemara isn’t really about rekindled love at all. It’s about how some people outgrow their hometowns – and how others grow roots so deep they never imagine anything else. Measured and melancholic, it lingers in the air like a memory quietly waiting to be remembered.
Christina Yang
Connemara does not have a release date yet.
Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival coverage here.
For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
YouTube
RSS