European Premiere
In Competition: Best International Feature

Short Synopsis:

After Fall, Winter is a secretive, dangerous and sexy love story about a French dominatrix who falls in love with a New York writer in Paris.

Review:

The sequel to writer-director Eric Schaeffer’s 1997 film Fall, Winter picks up on the life of protagonist Micheal Shivers, played with incredible candour by Schaeffer himself. Michael, now forty years old, desperately in debt and suffering from depression, moves from New York to Paris – the site of the traumatic love that was the subject of the earlier film. In its setting, tone and subtle links to a fiction occurring years prior, comparison’s can be made with Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, yet what Schaeffer has achieved here has far greater dramatic depth.

Whilst staying in Montmartre, Michael falls for the beautiful Sophie, who, claiming death and pain to be her only friends, splits her time working as a dominatrix and a carer to people on their deathbeds. Michael begins courting her in earnest, his personality painfully open and gently mocking, hers darkly brooding and restrained; two broken people attempting to find in the other the things they are missing, but only causing more pain. As Sophie nurses a dying 13 year old girl, she begins to open up to the redemptive potential of love, but it may already be too late. 

Moving without being sappy, romantic without being sentimental and shocking without feeling forced, Winter is a stunningly well made film, based on two astonishing performances with real chemistry. But this is a romance with a dark sting in its tale and its tragic ending, a delightfully perverse take on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, is one of the most disturbing and moving you will see this year.

Dean Bowman

Telephone Booking: call 0871 220 6000 and say "Operator' for a human being at the cinema.

Practical Information

Screenings at Apollo Cinema Piccadilly Circus
19 Lower Regent Street
SW1Y 4LR
London
www.appollocinemas.com

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