The pull between Eastern Europe and the West is well portrayed in this humorous story about love, prejudices,and difficult choices. The beautiful bi-lingual Romanian Brindusa, secretary and ex lover to middle-aged macho printing factory boss Nicu, wrestles between her old loyalties and her new love for German fiancé Stefan, a young printing engineer hired by Nicu to solve problems with the new German 'offset' printing machine he's just bought. Stefan and Brindusa plan to marry and start a new life in Germany, but as preparations get underway and Stefan's family arrive from Germany for the wedding with their own often hilarious set of prejudices, the increasingly jealous Nicu attempts to win back the younger woman in a complicated game of emotional blackmail, where job loyalty, past love and cultural roots are blended into one. Ultimately, Offset is a comment on the differences between the German and Romanian psyches and their clash in the process of Romania joining the European Union, through the focus of a young, modern woman discovering that her conception of love and comfort is intimately wrapped up in her own cultural roots and experience. Well paced and sensitively filmed in different languages, the film is a clear-eyed view of two sides of a cultural divide, and shows both the comical and the dramatic side-effects of the assumptions different nationalities make about each other.
(In Romanian and German with English subtitles)
A rare chance to see Gérard Depardieu in one of his earlier roles in this classic by legendary French director François Truffaut.
Bernard (Depardieu) is a happily married man, until his life is thrown into disarray with the arrival of new neighbours Phillipe and his wife Mathilde (a radiant Fanny Ardant) – Bernard's former lover, with whom he had once been passionately involved. Once reunited, the pair start a fervent but turbulent affair. Torn between their unyielding obsession for each other and the comfort and stability provided by their marriages, things precipitate as they find they can neither live with or without each other. La Femme D'à Côté (the Woman Next Door) is an alluring exploration of passion, guilt, and the consequences of betrayal by a master of the theme of obsessive love or 'amour fou', a theme which reverberates through much of Truffaut's work.
(in French withEnglish subtitles)