Hélène is a human resources consultant, a snarky and ambitious provincial girl made good. After a midcareer burnout, she has persuaded the father of her two children to leave Paris and move the family back to her native Lorraine. This return to the more peaceable world that Hélène long ago rejected doesn’t succeed in stilling her demons. Work and home conspire to irritate her: Hélène’s new boss has promoted a more recent male hire over her head; her partner is working later and later hours, and she’s resentful of his reluctance to assume his share of child care.
Bored, pissed off, alienated, Hélène drifts into a Tinder otherworld, seeking semi-anonymous revenge sex. During a failed date in a chain restaurant by a bowling alley, Hélène spots her high school classmate Christophe, a former hockey star. Sure, he’s put on a little weight and he was never all that bright, but her desire and curiosity are piqued.
Their ensuing motel-room love affair (described in pages of oddly generic sex) brings together two divergent small-town destinies. If Hélène is the class traitor who through brains and hard work escaped to the big city and is now trying to find her way home, Christophe, sweet-natured, dutiful, is the boy who never wanted to leave. Divorced, with an only son, Christophe is now selling dog food door to door and living with his father, who is struggling with dementia. Until he reconnects with Hélène, Christophe’s chief pleasures are getting drunk with his childhood buddies and dreaming of making a comeback with his old hockey team.
“Connemara” reaches its climax during the runoff to the 2017 elections, when President Emmanuel Macron faced the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. Hélène and Christophe’s romance thus becomes emblematic of the nation’s larger cultural and socioeconomic divides. The question of whether Hélène will leave her high-earning partner and seek a humbler kind of hometown happiness is mirrored by the larger question of whose France will prevail — the France of elite technocrats represented by Macron, or the nostalgic France invoked by the far right, a nation of working-class bars with photos of Jacques Brel on the wall, where the old-timers “scratched off lottery tickets as they chatted about politics, horse racing and immigrants.”
These open wounds of class belonging and dispossession are crucial subjects for both European and American writers today. Mathieu knows how to take us from a small-town hockey match to a corporate boardroom, but “Connemara” — despite Sam Taylor’s smooth translation — lacks the passion or the rigor to give the story more than a surface gloss.
