Suite Française

Suite Française (2015) is a wartime romance from director Saul Dibb that you can watch online on iFILM. France, summer 1940, the first weeks of occupation: in a small town a German officer is billeted in the home of a woman whose husband is away at war.

Lucile Angellier, played by Michelle Williams, lives under the sharp eye of her domineering mother-in-law, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, while waiting for word of her husband, a prisoner of war. When the army quarters officer Bruno von Falk in their house, Lucile tries to pretend he isn't there. Music undoes her resolve: he was once a composer, and he sits down at her piano. What follows is a forbidden attachment neither can afford, surrounded by neighbors' denunciations, requisitions and a stirring resistance where love and betrayal tangle together. The cast also includes Matthias Schoenaerts, Sam Riley, Ruth Wilson and Margot Robbie.

The film draws on an unfinished novel by Irène Némirovsky, a Jewish writer killed at Auschwitz in 1942; her manuscript sat in a suitcase for decades and was finally published in 2004. Dibb keeps the war intimate, told through one house and one impossible romance rather than battlefields. It suits viewers who favor quiet historical dramas about impossible choices. Stream Suite Française (2015) online on iFILM.