Madeleine Collins * * * *

We get two serves of Virginia Eifra in Madeleine Collins

We've seen a bit of Virginia Efira lately (I'm not complaining).  She was recently in Benedetta and, at the French Film Festival last year, she was in the comedy Bye Bye Morons.

In The French Film Festival 22, she takes the lead role in a couple of films, Waiting for Bojangles, and this excellent mystery thriller, Madeleine Collins. Like the recent Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, it's another "Crazy Lady" film. 

Madeleine Collins is a polygamist who leads a double life and is in constant transit between two households.  

Her first marriage is to a successful orchestra conductor. They have two teenage sons.  Intelligent, artistic, creative, handsome, they are a family to be envied.

Her second is to a man who is an unemployed widower with a four year old daughter.   He lives across the border in Switzerland.  Having lost a wife who he dearly loved, lacking education, and trying to raise his child alone his life isn't so easy.  But he is not a slouch: he is a man with self-respect.  At the beginning of the film we witness the strange death of his first wife, though we are not shown how "Madeleine Collins" came into his life. But they are happy together.

She lies about everything: her name (it changes a lot), her work, where she is currently located, her reasons for staying away in one place or another, her occupation.  She does actually have a good and legitimate job as an interpreter but her life is so complicated that too is at risk.

It's a fascinating story, that becomes frustratingly  confusing at times, but our patience is always rewarded with clarity later.  Clues and insights are constantly presented, as she imitates the illness of the woman that died, as she quickly befriends a simple usher at a theatre, as she flirts and lies to a man who she has just met as she smokes outside.

The performances are moving and impressive - no one more so than Virginia Eifra.