Word: quotidian
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...interplay of Chulkaturin's memories and Zoditch's quotidian existence is handled very cleverly even on a purely physical level. Because the memoirs come alive only through the readership of Zoditch, Chulkaturin's history is played out among the paraphernalia of Zoditch's boarding house. The first reader's bed serves the focus for much of the action--parior scenes, forest scene, garden scenes all occur around the bed, on which Zoditch, himself sits, reading the manuscript, impervious and scornful...
Throughout, the moviemakers observe all kinds of quotidian events in the sundering of the Dunlaps without turning them into heavily fraught symbolic moments: the children clamoring for eye shadow as their mother tries to put on makeup for a party; the nervous chipperness of George's lady friend (Karen Allen) when she meets the children for the first time; and their attempt to give her a fair chance without being disloyal to their mother; George self-consciously trying to be brave in front of them and not being able to keep the self-pity out of it; the puzzling...
...This time, in fact, he provides a surrogate for himself in the person of an older woman, Mme. Jouve (Véronique Silver), the manager of the tennis club where much of the action takes place. She is gray, like the subdued light of the film itself. She is quotidian in her concerns, as Truffaut is in the selection of the details by which he illuminates the good, separate lives the lovers begin to jeopardize. And, since Mme. Jouve once literally crippled herself for love, she has earned the right, which she does not exercise, to comment either bitterly...
Heart to Heart respects the charm of the quotidian, finds in its little dramas wisdom and absurdity, sadness and folly-and, above all, liveliness. This cheering, but unsappy outlook is much in evidence as the younger generation of French directors, like Diane Kurys and Jean Charles Tacchella, crawls out from under Francois Truffaut's overcoat. It seems to be an almost exclusively Gallic view, making one want to send the entire American motion picture industry to sum mer school in France...
...would, however, be wrong to suggest that this graceful, lyrical film is just a tease. Voyage en Douce is about longing - for sexual connections that are some thing other than briefly poignant or lengthily quotidian. There is a real feeling of regret when the two women complete their voyage en douce and return to their separate lives...