A gripping if occasionally overwrought drama radiated by a standout turn from Seydoux.
Grand Central
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
France, Austria · 2013
1h 34m
Director Rebecca Zlotowski
Starring Léa Seydoux, Tahar Rahim, Olivier Gourmet, Denis Ménochet
Genre Drama, Romance
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A young unemployed man finds work at a nuclear power plant and begins an illicit affair with the fiancée of one of his senior workmates.
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What are critics saying?
Seydoux again offers a frank turn, while Rahim and Ménochet add real class.
Zlotowski has turned in a beguiling film that impresses as much for its oddly specific and well-researched setting (the ragtag community of lower-grade workers at a nuclear power plant), as for the romance, and maintains impressive narrative and tonal control right up until an ending that falters just at the final hurdle.
Zlotowski's Grand Central is a fascinating film on an urgent and seldom-explored situation.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
Some critics have expressed reservations about melodrama and overworked symbolism, but I found it gripping, with an edge of delirium.
[Zlotowski] creates a situation, casts it perfectly, and backs out of a fully achieved story. As drama, it’s coitus interruptus, with a Geiger counter doing the interrupting.
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