Audrey Tautou stars as Thérèse, a frustrated young housewife in 1920s provincial southwest France, suffocating in a marriage of convenience to an arrogant landowning neighbor, Bernard (Gilles Lellouche).
Her seemingly comfortable life becomes unbearable, when her best friend Anne (Anaïs Demoustier) begins a passionate love affair with a dashing young man, and Thérèse begins to understand the limits of her existence.
As Thérèse yearns for escape to a bohemian life in jazz-age Paris, she accidentally discovers that her husband’s daily heart medicine contains arsenic, and begins to form a plan of escape from her emotional prison.
In the late director Claude Miller’s beautifully shot period adaptation of the classic novel by François Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux is a gloriously conceived costume melodrama, in the vein of Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina. Marvellously played by the Audrey Tautou, whose intense depiction conveys all the inflections of hurt and pain, love and sorrow.
