Avant l'hiver (Philippe Claudel, 2013)

Before the Winter Chill stars those trusty warhorses of French drama, Daniel Auteuil and Kristin Scott Thomas, as a well-to-do couple (of course) whose marriage is stuck in neutral after years of drifting along. He's a truculent brain surgeon and she is a bored stay-at-home wife, and their fragile stability is rocked when he starts seeing a damaged young woman, a former patient of his.
The veteran leads are as solid as ever, but the whole set-up of an outwardly comfortable middle-class couple with repressed dissatisfaction, inevitably heading towards affairs, is just too much of a trope of genteel French cinema to engage the emotions deeply, unless something more raw is added to the mix, and this is yet another piece which is just too bloodless to be able to do that.

5/10