Just for one night, a clip from the film with Jeanne Balibar

THEto a woman who, every Tuesday, she climbs to the top to choose a lover Just for one night it’s the same one that, every other day, she looks after her disabled son with devotionalready an adult. The scheme seems oiled and efficient. As long as it doesn’t jam. At the cinema from 12 December, Maxime Rappaz’s first feature film is the story of the luminous and painful emancipation of a woman from her role as a mother. A rarefied melodrama that everything rests on the slender and elegant figure of the protagonist, Jeanne Balibar.

A clip from the film Just for one night

In the clip we see her returning from one of her escapes: She still has the white dress on, still the same, which she chooses to dress in the libertine niche that she allows herself to inhabit every week. He stops at the door, listening to his son strumming on the piano. With a moved look, she smiles at him and gives him an image of Lady D, the boy’s idol. And then, in a summery and melancholy mountain landscape, she returns with him to her usual life.

The plot of the film

Claudine is almost an ascetic: every single day she is the patient and obsequious mother of a young disabled man: she looks after him at home, where she works as a seamstress. Only on Tuesdays does he take the train and go far away.

Beyond the Grande-Dixence dam there is a hotel where a complicit concierge points them out every time the most passing man of all. A Florentine today, an Englishman next week. Claudine proposes a polite exchange of jokes centered on the foreigner’s country of origin: they will serve her as raw material to write fictitious letters sent to her son by an absent father. And she invites them to come up to their room with her. He has an embrace, says thanks and leaves.

For an unspecified time, everything slips away smoothly, like the train that takes her back to the valley every time. Until a German, a hydroelectric engineer unexpectedly decides to extend his stay. And he manages to break Claudine’s pattern. Her clockwork daily newspaper which, until that moment, had prevented her from accessing the state of happiness.

The devotion of the mother of a disabled person, the desire of a mature woman

«I wanted to portray a woman in that crucial moment of life in which the time you still have to live is shorter than the time that has already passed. The crucial moment – ​​which can surprise us – in which, more than ever, we can feel the need to make a change in our lives.” This is how the director, born in 1986, talks about the subject of his film. To do this she chooses a mother, moreover the mother of a disabled boy who chains her to him without pity, but dependent on her now and indefinitely.

Claudine is the emblem of the many women who take on the role of caregiver to the point of isolating themselves from the rest of the world. Pure, allows himself to express needs that go beyond the role: takes strenuously care of her beauty. And he allows himself to go to the mountains and have sex every week. An organized, perfect, icy scheme. But Claudine is not freezing at all, and is destined to melt like snow in the sun, but with outcomes that are not the most predictable.

The symbolic setting

Rappaz chooses for his film a symbolic, sublimated setting: Claudine leads a daily life in the valley with her son and her work as a seamstress, and then flees to the mountains. Here she behaves like an uninhibited woman right in front of a dizzying dam, behind which «there are 100 million cubic meters of water that could overwhelm us», as her lover reminds her.

The story is set in 1997, in the summer that Princess Diana died, that Claudine’s son adores. But the choice of the historical periodnot yet pervaded by modern means of communication, it is above all aesthetic: the exact frame for the characters staged. As the director explained, “I couldn’t imagine them using cell phones.”

The cast: the protagonist is Jeanne Balibar

For One Night Only is based on the measured acting of Jeanne Balibar and her beauty that is both cold and seething at the same timediscreet and sensual. Parisian, 56 years old, daughter of a philosopher and a scientist, she is an actress with a murky charm who grew up in the theater, with La Comédie Française. In cinema he has worked with Arnaud Desplechin, Jacques Rivette (Who knows?with Sergio Castellitto), Olivier Assayas and Mathieu Amalric (her ex-husband and father of her two children).

His son is played bySwiss actor Pierre-Antoine Dubeywhich Rappaz had already chosen for his short film Tendresse. To play Baptiste he immersed himself in a center for people with disabilities: his character is credible, not at all caricatural.

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