A Few Hours of Spring

Quelques heures de printemps

Stéphane Brizé’s quiet but emotionally devastating drama stars Vincent Lindon as a man coming to terms with his own weaknesses and his elderly mother’s mortality.

Even if a screening is sold out, tickets are often available 30 minutes before the start of the film at the box office at each venue.


Image gallery

  • Director Stéphane Brizé
  • Producer Miléna Poylo, Gilles Sacuto
  • Screenwriter Stéphane Brizé, Florence Vignon
  • With Vincent Lindon, Hélène Vincent, Emmanuelle Seigner
  • France 2012
  • 108 mins
  • Sales Rezo Films

No-one in European cinema plays strong, silent types – or maps the tender fault lines of masculinity – as compellingly as France’s Vincent Lindon. In this taut but hugely moving drama, Lindon plays Alain, a former trucker back living with his mother (Hélène Vincent) after doing time on a smuggling charge. Getting his life back on the rails isn’t easy, especially given his tense relationship with his emotionally detached parent. But when he learns of the health crisis that dominates her life, he must finally decide to show solidarity with her in the most testing of circumstances. Director Stéphane Brizé (I’m Not Here to Be Loved) is proving a specialist in understated, emotionally charged realism, and in its determinedly unshowy way, A Few Hours of Spring is his most masterly drama yet. The scenes between mother and son are magnetically performed, with Lindon’s self-effacing espousal of the ‘less is more’ approach yielding irresistible results.
Jonathan Romney

Director statement

In 2004, I saw an extraordinary documentary on television: Le Choix de Jean (Jean’s Choice). This footage showed the last months of a man, Jean, suffering from an incurable disease, and who had decided to die before reaching the terminal phase of the disease. I watched the film, it upset me and it stayed in a corner of my head. And on a piece of magnetic tape too, as I had recorded it. In 2009 I felt the urge to watch it again. I was moved by this story again and this film was one of the first elements of thinking when we started working with Florence Vignon. In fact it gave us the idea to use assisted suicide as a strong element of drama. It also allowed me to discover the specific protocol followed by people who decide to die this way. This I could not invent. I contacted the directors of the documentary, Stéphanie Malphettes and Stephan Villeneuve, I asked them if I could draw my inspiration from scenes of their film for all that is related to the suicide assistance protocol and they accepted. Later, I met members of self-deliverance assistance associations in Switzerland in order to be as close to reality as possible in my film [...]. Everything happens in Switzerland as I show it does. But it’s not euthanasia, it’s assisted suicide. I m not talking of a shade of meaning, I’m talking of a fundamental difference. In Switzerland, like in France, euthanasia – the practice aiming at causing, by a doctor or under their control, the death of an individual suffering from a terminal illness – is forbidden. However, what is allowed in this country is helping a person who wishes to commit suicide provided there are no selfish motives. That is to say legacy, to the one who organises this assisted death. Within this space of tolerance associations of assistance to suicide were created.
Stéphane Brizé

Director biography

Born in 1966 in Rennes, he studied electronics and entered television as a technician, but was then inspired to study drama. He briefly worked in the theatre, but started making short films in 1993 and features a dozen years later, usually co-scripting with Florence Vignon (the pair also co-wrote Vignon’s directorial debut, the 1999 short Le Premier Pas).

Filmography

1993 Bleu dommage [s]
1996 L'Œil qui traîne [s]
1999 Le Bleu des villes (Hometown Blue)
2004 Le bel instant [doc]
2005 Un vie de rêves [s]; Je ne suis pas là pour être aimé (Not Here to Be Loved)
2007 Entre adultes (Among Adults)
2009 Mademoiselle Chambon
2012 Quelques heures de printemps (A Few Hours of Spring)