Entre Nous movie review & film summary (1984)

She makes a friend named Madeleine (Miou-Miou). They share their secrets and dreams. They have a meeting of the minds that neither one has ever really had with a man. But their friendship enrages Michel, who sees it as a rejection. He can really only relate to women in two ways: protectively, or with hostility. He feels that since he provides everything at home that Lena could possibly desire, she has no need for other friends. Alone with Madeleine, he makes a sexual advance so crude it is insulting. Then he decides that the two women are lesbians.

This description makes Michel sound like a simple monster. Actually, he is painted more subtly, as a good husband in his own way and according to his own standards, who has not been provided with enough different ways to think about women. “Entre Nous” suggests that this marriage was more the rule than the exception in postwar France, and that a woman who demanded choices in her life was seen as a rebel.

Meanwhile, the two women open a boutique. They go to Paris to buy stock. They become something more than just good friends, although the movie is deliberately ambiguous about whether they have a sexual relationship.

Back home again, in a scene of startling violence, Michel tears the boutique to shreds with his bare hands. And now both women must choose between their visions of themselves and the roles society would force upon them.

“Entre Nous” (which is one of this year's Oscar nominees for best foreign film) is fascinating for the detailed way the director, Diane Kurys, sees her characters. If my summary makes it sound like some sort of feminist tract, it is not: Kurys sees everyone, men and women, in an evenhanded way that suggests they are the victims of a rigid society.

Huppert and Miou-Miou are especially good at suggesting the different ways they relate to each other and to men. With each other, they are informal, off-guard, unstudied. With men, they always seem to be either playing a role, or testing a new role. That is sometimes a dangerous game to play in a society where few things between a man and a woman are truly entre nous.

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