An Impossible Love

At the end of the 1950s, Rachel, a young Jewish office clerk living in a provincial town, meets Philippe, a charismatic man from a bourgeois family. They share an intense but short-lived romance, from which a daughter is born. Over the next 50 years, their lives will be shaped by the unconditional love between the mother and her daughter, overshadowed by the impossible love of a woman for a man who rejects her, and of a daughter for an absent and abusive father. An Impossible Love, adapted from a novel by Christine Angot, is a brilliantly dark and tender family drama that meditates on all forms of love — familial, romantic, functional — and their messy intersections.