What is most interesting is that this girl, who crashes onto screen on a bike, kills rabbits and pidgeons for the family, takes a lover and is then imprisonned by her powerful parents, is not the protagonist. These are the actions of Anne (Anaïs Demoustier), the childhood friend of Thérèse, whose story, far more dramatic and classically cinematic, is told through letters and painful pleas for help. The two women are both destined for powerful marriages arranged to monopolise the ownership of riverside pine forests, and Thérèse, the elder, goes through hers first. As she does, Anne's story of forbidden love begins, and Thérèse sees that her path was not the only one available.
In some respects, this is a story we've heard before. Unhappy with her moustachioed husband (Gilles Lelouche), Thérèse becomes distant and searches for a way out- but such is the importance of the two families that this could never really happen. Sickness, attempted murder and separation tear little by little at the fabric of the union, but The Good of the Family is all-important, making everybody miserable but forever keeping up appearances.
So this is still a tale of Bovarysme, of post-marital regret, but one far more restrained. Tatou's poker-faced Coco Chanel is resurrected, as is her talent for playing a stubborn lead, if not necessarily a powerful one. And it is this stubbornness and knowledge of what is best for her that keeps Thérèse on her feet. By the end of the film we see not a ruined woman, but one who has been imprisoned, silenced, told she can do nothing without her husband's permission, openly chided by maids and deserted by her nearest and dearest. Despite the poster's image of a timid and teary Tatou (who only appears to be wearing eyeliner on one eye), what we see on-screen is a woman constantly hemmed in by the society around her, much like Baudelaire's heroine of old, but one far more prepared to react to it and, eventually, escape it.
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