Suite Francaise review: what is this film playing at, when it comes to Jews in attics?

Suite Française is being billed as a second world war romance about ‘forbidden love’ and, in this regard, it is handsome, solid, well played and probably fine, if you haven’t read Irène Némirovsky’s novel, but if you have? Then you may have been hoping and praying for something deeper, something more special. As you know — because I have been nothing if not repetitive down the years — I desperately try not to compare films with their source material. Let a film live or die by its own merits. But this book nags like nothing else on earth. What? Really? No! And where did that Jew in the attic come from? What is this film playing at, when it comes to Jews in attics? Can anyone put a Jew in an attic, whenever they so fancy? Could I put a few up there, this afternoon?

A bit of background: Némirovsky was a French–Ukrainian Jew who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942 before she could complete an epic five-part portrait of life under the Nazis. She completed two of the parts — eventually published by her daughter in 2004, to international acclaim — and it’s the second part, Dolce, that is filmed here. This describes life in a French village during occupation, which is the life Némirovsky was living at the time of writing — the books are history as it was happening; that is what makes them so urgent and extraordinary — and focuses on Lucile Angellier, whose husband is a prisoner of war and who lives with her mean and domineering mother-in law. (A superb Kristin Scott Thomas, whose Madame Angellier is so cold and so white-skinned it’s as if her blood can’t even manage the warmth to circulate.)

However, their dynamic is disturbed when the Germans roll into town and they are billeted with an officer (Matthias Schoenaerts), who is refined, decent, hot (it’s Matthias Schoenaerts) and plays the piano beautifully; plays the piano dolce.