

Twenty years have passed. Thérèse lives alone in Paris. We exiled her there. She seems to be asking nothing more for life. She is sick and lives in slow motion. One day, we ring rue du Bac. It is Mary, her daughter, whom she sees so little. She is twenty years old now and comes to see her to escape her middle-class south-west. She is very in love with a boy, she expects from her mother a support, a freedom of point of view. His name is Murad. The arrival of her daughter awakens Therese with her reserve and torpor. It does not shock Mary, who is very busy with her love. Thérèse proposes to meet Mourad. She quickly understands that he is not willing to marry Mary but wants her without wanting to bond more deeply to her. It is she Therese, that the young man looks ... She wanted to help her daughter to be happy, a wish too official not to be suspicious. Here she is delivered to the power of her own seduction ...
Acting
Nicole Garcia's devastating restraint as Thérèse
Direction
Belvaux's clinical observation of erotic power
Cinematography
Parisian interiors that breathe with unspoken want

Director
Lucas Belvaux
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Belvaux finally filmed Maurois' 1935 sequel to François Mauriac's Thérèse Desqueyroux, previously considered unfilmable due to its moral queasiness.
Nicole Garcia had played Thérèse decades earlier in a 1981 TV adaptation—this is her return to the character she never escaped.
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