Love is a warm feeling that makes people feel elevated. By the same token, love can also make people experience the darker side of human emotions like jealousy, anger, pain and trauma. The potential for love to go from good to sour is very real in every relationship. La Femme d’a Cote is a film about two lovers who experience this two-sided nature of love throughout their relation.

Bernard (Gerard Depardieu) lives with his wife and five year old son in a quiet little village. He is a loving husband and a caring father. The happy family life is shattered by the arrival of their new neighbours. Outwardly, everything is ok. The two sets of neighbours do the things expected of them, like invite each other over. But we learn that Bernard and Mathilde are in fact former lovers who separated due to misunderstandings. The passionate feelings they had for each other haven’t quite disappeared, though that they are married to other people. In fact, the proximity serves to reignite passions.

Throughout the film, their relationship displays a constructive and a destructive side. It is as if the ex-lovers, now reunited, are not able to decide whether to love fully or remain bitter about the past. Bernard is particularly affected by Mathilde’s re-entry into his life and shows it outwardly. Mathilde, is also equally affected, but her ardour is tempered by a conflicting feeling of wanting to move on.

The dynamics of the relationship are too much for Mathilde and she suffers a nervous breakdown. In hospital she experiences extreme mood swings and depression. Bernard meanwhile has managed to contain his emotions, barely.

Is the relationship doomed to be trapped in this conflicting mode? The only way out of it seems to be a violent catharsis. Mathilde returns home one night and makes love to Bernard. She then shoots him and then pulls the trigger on herself. At last the lovers are where they would have wanted to be; neither with anybody else, nor with each other.

But is this the only way it could have ended? I don’t believe so. In choosing a violent end for the lovers, the director (Francois Truffaut) seems to be suggesting that such conflicting emotions cannot exist without clashing and will self destruct. I don’t quite agree with this reading.