Benoît Jacquot’s splendid screen adaptation of a 2006 novel by Pascal Quignard (Tous les matins du monde) is a taut, beautifully assured existential drama starring the incomparable Isabelle Huppert—in her fifth collaboration with the director—as Ann, a middle-aged musician and composer who methodically severs all ties to her staid life after she uncovers her husband’s affair with a younger woman. With her music and a friend from her distant past (Jean-Hugues Anglade) serving as catalysts, Ann sets out on a relentlessly open-ended journey of renunciation and self-discovery that takes her, for a time, to a remote Italian island and a house named Villa Amalia. Cold and inscrutable, Ann is like an iceberg set purposefully adrift in the warm waters of the Mediterranean, where the turmoil beneath the surface—richly conveyed in Bruno Coulais’ integral score—never completely thaws but roils and transforms.

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Written by Benoît Jacquot, Julien Boivent. Photographed by Caroline Champetier. With Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Maya Sansa. (97 min. In French and Italian with English subtitles, EuropaCorp)