Clair Obscur (2016)

A young wife is basically a servant in her own home. She sneaks cigarettes and watches the antics of girls her age across street with obvious wistfulness. She dreads the obviously painful sex with her much-older husband and resents the bossiness of her mother-in-law, who also lives with them. When she is found hypothermic on the balcony and the other two inside dead of possibly accidental causes, a young female psychiatrist is called in. Though the doctor is in what appears to be a modern marriage, e.g. her husband openly watches porn with regularity and she doesn't seem to mind, the new patient causes her to reassess her own life. 

I honestly had a hard time with this movie. My issues were mostly with the doctor's life. 1) I absolutely hated the sex scenes: they were too intimate -- too full of sounds I shouldn't hear. I don't really have anything against legal porn, but I hadn't planned on watching any when I started up this film. Also, 2) her methods seemed fairly questionable to me.

All of that said, I appreciated the fact that, though their lives appeared to be completely different, correlations could be drawn and acted on. I think that we often accept shitty -- but changeable -- circumstances due to "so many people have it worse" reasoning. We are each living our own lives and are allowed to work toward happiness.

C+