‘Out of Season’ Review: Two Lost Lovers Get a Second Chance to Say Goodbye in Stéphane Brizé’s Delicate Mood Piece

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic There’s a faintly between-worlds air to the coastal luxury spa in which the bulk of “Out of Season” is set: Spartan and depopulated, decorated in assorted shades of oyster white and palest aqua, it’s half sanatorium and half heaven’s gate, made uncannier still by the empty, forbidding sprawl of the wintering beach outside.

That makes it an apt place for burnt-out actor Mathieu (Guillaume Canet) to come and consider where his life has led him thus far; it also proves a kind of corridor to the past, minus any actual time travel, when his visit reunites him with Alice (Alba Rohrwacher), a spurned lover from years before.

In Stéphane Brizé’s lovely, sorrowful reflection on missed chances and regained connections, their reacquaintance isn’t necessarily permanent, and it doesn’t trigger the love story you might expect — but it’s deeply, searchingly romantic all the same.

Premiering at the tail-end of this year’s Venice competition — a subtle, semi-sweet palate cleaner to many of the brasher auteur statements preceding it — “Out of Season’s” gentle emotional tenor and wry humor make it a bracing departure from Brizé’s recent work, in particular his trilogy of politically seething workplace dramas “Measure of a Man,” “At War” and “Another World.” It’s consistent, however, with the director’s hushed humanism and deep, needling command of character, giving this notionally wispy story a lingering, substantial sadness.