A View of Love

A View of Love (Un balcon sur la mer, 2010) is a French romantic drama you can watch online on iFILM. Jean Dujardin plays a man whose comfortable life cracks open the moment a face from his childhood walks back in.

Marc is a successful estate agent in Aix-en-Provence, married, a doting father. Then a client arrives to view a country house, and a few hours later he places her: Cathy, the girl he loved as a boy in Oran, Algeria, in the final days of French colonial rule. They spend one night together. By morning she has vanished. And Marc's mother quietly tells him the truth she has carried for decades — Cathy died as a teenager, killed with her father in a bombing on the eve of Algerian independence. So who was the woman in the hotel?

Director Nicole Garcia turns this into less a thriller than a slow vertigo between memory and obsession, with Marie-Josée Croze, Sandrine Kiberlain, Toni Servillo and Claudia Cardinale rounding out the cast. If you like a love story laced with a cold thread of mystery, this lands harder than the usual melodrama. Stream A View of Love (2010) online on iFILM.