Ceux qui restent (2007)

At a hospital in the Paris region, Bertrand visits his wife every day. She has been suffering from breast cancer for five years. He meets Lorraine, whose partner has colon cancer. Before long, she offers to drive him to the hospital each day so he can avoid a long bus ride. A German teacher, Bertrand Liévain lives with his wife’s daughter, sixteen-year-old Valentine, who does not much like her stepfather and with whom he has a stormy relationship. A graphic designer, Lorraine Grégeois had known her partner for a year and had moved in with him a few months earlier. According to the film’s press-kit description, Bertrand and Lorraine “are the ones who pace the corridors, asking forbidden questions, get noticed at the newsstand, talk too loudly in the cafeteria, and sneak off to smoke on the roof of the hospital where their partners are being treated. Because, to cope with the guilt of being alive and well, Bertrand and Lorraine have decided to help each other live, laugh, and go on loving.” Although their personalities and their reactions to their loved ones’ illnesses differ greatly—he does everything for his wife and has long neglected his own day-to-day life, while she is anxious about not being good enough for her partner and wants to go on living—Bertrand and Lorraine gradually move from a friendship born of circumstance into a different kind of relationship. As his wife’s condition worsens and he struggles to tell his stepdaughter, Bertrand is visited by his sister Nathalie, who gets along much better with the teenager, and by Nathalie’s family.