This low-key French drama is frustratingly slow to get going. It’s a study of Anne (Sandrine Kiberlain), a woman who lives alone and keeps to herself in the restaurant where she works. Her isolation hints that something has gone very wrong in her life. Anne is completely inscrutable, which feels a bit like an arthouse endurance test until she begins to reveal her secrets. At the cinema, she bumps into a family she’s known in the past; at work she playfully brushes off a chef who fancies her.
To say more would spoil the drip-drip of gentle revelations that defines this unassumingly intelligent film. Anne, it emerges, is numbed by grief, and Kiberlain’s subtle performance is poignant: when the worst thing you can imagine happens, how do you go on living? It’s plausibly handled, except for the bird of the title – a pigeon Anne takes care of after it flaps into her flat. Surely a more realistic response would be to reach for a heavy-duty broom handle.