A period drama as passionless as its long-suffering protagonist, Thérèse charts the unhappy union of Audrey Tautou and Gilles Lellouche, whose pine-bearing tycoon families compel them to marry as a means of consolidating and solidifying wealth and stature in the 1928 French countryside. Destined to be betrothed to Lellouche since childhood, Tautou accepts her fate willingly, though quiet acquiescence to parental dictates nonetheless soon results in corrosive unhappiness. The root cause of that malaise, however, is left frustratingly opaque by the film—the last by director Claude Miller (The Little Thief, A Secret)—which suggests as the source of Tautou’s discontent not only latent lesbian longing for her lifelong friend-cum-sister-in-law (Anaïs Demoustier) and a greedy hunger for full control of Lellouche’s pines, but also a desire for greater freedom from her in-laws’ domineering influence. Additionally, there’s a fleeting implication that Tautou craves the type of unfettered, ardent amour Demoustier shares with her young lover Stanley Weber, who nonchalantly expresses his own interest in pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Yet on this central issue, the film makes little concrete effort toward specificity, thus rendering its portrait of its main character so fuzzy that there’s no sense of urgency, or even clear purpose, to the eventual, homicidal path upon which she chooses to embark.