AN IMPOSSIBLE LOVE

An office romance between a provincial typist (Virginie Efira) and a well-read bourgeois (Niels Schneider) spawns an illegitimate child he refuses to acknowledge in a generation-spanning saga that conceals a dark secret beneath its soapy trappings. Extending from the late ’50s to the present day, it deftly charts the changing attitudes that allow them to make peace with their pasts. Neil Smith