La Chamade

La Chamade (US title: Heartbeat) is a 1968 film directed and written by Alain Cavalier based on the 1965 novel by French playwright and novelist Françoise Sagan. The film stars Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli. Like many of Sagan's novels, this is a story of lost love. A married woman and a poor artist begin an affair an eventually move in together, but the woman cannot get used to his life, his working-class existence. She leaves her lover to return to her marriage with a man of means. Ostensibly, she is rejecting her lover because she feels stifled by his position in society. But the class differences are metaphor for the quality of the love, with a woman deciding to be with a man who loves her for who she is rather than as an...