Le passager de l'été (2006)

In 1950, in the traditional, rural and Catholic postwar Normandy of the Cotentin, many men have been killed in combat or reported missing, leaving widows and orphans to fend for themselves in a harsh agricultural world where work is hard. Joseph, an illiterate seasonal farmhand, goes from farm to farm looking for work. He finds a job on Monique’s family farm. Having heard nothing from her husband since the war, she runs the estate alone with a heavy hand and lives among women: her widowed mother-in-law and her daughter, who is still unmarried and teaches at the village school. The young, handsome Joseph soon causes a stir among Monique, who becomes his mistress; Jeanne, who also becomes his mistress and falls pregnant; and Angèle, who fails to seduce him. All this takes place under the eye of the mayor, who was Monique’s occasional lover before Joseph arrived. At the end of the film, Joseph is driven away by Monique, who can no longer bear to share him with her daughter, and then lets herself die.