Les apparences (2020)

Évelyne “Ève” Monlibert (Karin Viard), director of the French Institute library in Vienna, is married to Henri (Benjamin Biolay), a prestigious conductor at the Konzerthaus, the city’s illustrious opera house. They have a six-year-old son, Malo, whom they adopted in Guatemala. The couple moves in the chic, snobbish, cosseted world of French expatriates. Coming from a modest background, Ève is somewhat ashamed of her roots, which Claudine, her mother—a plainspoken, straightforward woman whom Ève hides from her friends—reminds her of simply by being there during her brief visits to Vienna. Henri is distant and taciturn, struggling to conceal his boredom and the little interest he now has in his wife. He only comes to life during discreet phone calls. Ève eventually begins to have doubts. One day, while looking at her husband’s cell phone, she discovers that he has a mistress: Tina Brunner (Lætitia Dosch), her son’s young teacher. Stunned, then suffocating with pain, she goes to a bar to take her mind off things and have a drink. At the bar, she realizes she hasn’t brought any money. The bartender says she can come back and pay another day, and asks her to write her contact details in the establishment’s register. A young Austrian at the bar offers to pay for her glass of wine. They start talking. His name is Jonas; she tells him her name is Tina. When he gets more forward, Ève declines and prepares to go home. She changes her mind, joins him at his table, and apologizes. They talk; he tells her he is troubled too. They drink some more, and she dances. As Ève and Jonas leave the bar, a woman photographs a group of musicians in costume, while in the background Ève and Jonas are kissing. They rent a hotel room and sit on the bed. Jonas cuddles up to her and falls asleep. During the night, Ève wakes up. Jonas is still asleep. She gets dressed, goes home, and gets into bed beside Henri. The next day, jealous, she goes to meet Tina at the school so she can get a closer look at her. She catches Tina opening her email. Ève glimpses the first two letters of Tina’s password: “ko.” During this brief encounter, Ève makes ambiguous remarks to Tina (is she talking about Malo or her husband?) that leave Tina thinking Ève is suspicious. When Jonas wakes up alone in his hotel room, he showers; he is wearing an electronic ankle bracelet. He leaves the hotel and wants to find the woman from that one night who has become the focus of all his fantasies. He goes to the bar where they met, remembering that the bartender wrote down the contact details of the customer who didn’t have any change to pay for her drink. But the bartender refuses to give them to him. Furious, Jonas reveals a deeply alarming, violent and volatile side. Knowing that Ève is French, he begins haunting places frequented by the French, starting with the French Institute. Although she gave him only a false first name—the name of her husband’s mistress—he manages to track her down and soon starts harassing her at work in an effort to see her again, something Ève absolutely wants no part of. Ève has other concerns: she follows her husband and confirms that he is being unfaithful. Beside herself with rage once she gets home, after several failed attempts she manages to reconstruct Tina’s email password. She finds Tina’s love messages to Henri. Enraged, she attaches one of these intimate messages to a circular from the school to the parents and sends the whole thing to the small French-school community. Naturally, the email, with its message taken out of context, has the effect of a bomb in this idle, gossiping world, which is delighted to have something to chew over. As everyone makes a great fuss over the blunder and Clémence, a real viper and Ève’s best friend, blows things out of proportion, Tina is called on to explain herself. During an awkward face-to-face meeting with the parents, including Ève and Henri, she nevertheless manages to extricate herself from the trap by claiming that it was simply an excerpt from a novel she was working on, forwarded by mistake. For the time being, that is the end of the matter. Tina meets Henri and, excited, promises him a surprise: she pulls a photo from her bag, taken by a friend, showing a couple kissing in the street. It is Ève and Jonas. Triumphant, Tina believes this revelation will finally change the dynamic between Henri and his wife, since Henri will no longer have to spare Ève’s feelings. But the effect is the opposite of what she expected: once Henri knows that another man desires Ève, he becomes interested in his wife again. Meanwhile, Ève returns to Tina’s email account and discovers plane tickets booked in the name of a certain Bettina Lebrun. Intrigued, she searches for information and discovers that Tina changed her name after a nasty incident—the accidental death of her former partner’s little girl, who had been in Tina’s care—for which Tina was cleared of charges. As she had before, Ève emails the results of her search to the whole French-school community. This time the scandal is so huge that Tina is fired. Ève overhears a phone conversation between Henri and Tina in which he curtly tells her that, after what he has just learned, it is over between them. Tina moves to Brussels. Henri, now consumed by jealousy in his turn, becomes much more attentive to his wife. He follows her when she goes to meet Jonas to put a definitive end to their relationship. They meet in a secluded spot, on a jetty by the Danube. The conversation between Ève and Jonas turns heated, and in a rage he throws her to the ground. Henri, watching from a distance, comes to his wife’s rescue. A fight breaks out, and Henri eventually drowns Jonas. The couple slips away without anyone having witnessed the scene. Jonas’s body is found. The police investigate and learn that Jonas was a stalker who had already been convicted. They trace him to Ève because he had photos of her in his room, but Ève pretends not to know him and describes him as an ordinary library user. Meanwhile, Tina, who has had an investigation carried out into the computer hacking she suffered, learns that Ève was responsible. Passing a newsstand, she sees a newspaper’s front-page photo of the man drowned in the Danube and recognizes him as the man kissing Ève in the picture. She has her revenge. She sends the police the photo of the kissing couple, and they soon identify Ève and Henri. A few months later, the couple is cleared of charges. But for Ève, life in Vienna is now over. The small circle of high-society acquaintances she had built for herself now turns its back on her. Worse, Henri leaves her. She didn’t want to face the ridicule of being the betrayed wife, and it ended with Jonas’s death, Tina being fired and ostracized, Ève’s own exile to Paris, serious trouble for Henri, and ultimately their separation and the destruction of their marriage. All of it, just to save appearances.