Um spoilers coming, but the short take : honestly I'd skip this film.

If this were a silent film, maybe the affair the wife partakes in would be seen as the one with trace elements of joy. Of course in the film even with the sound on, theirs is nearly silent, as her lover rarely speaks. And perhaps that is the key to a successful union.

Strange film, strange in that it looks like a film from 40 years ago (I assume intentional; and no, not just the black and white footage). Strange as it's a French film with a scolding take on infidelity, which I thought from other such films was seen like baguettes, omnipresent and at least tasty for a little bit?

Don't get me wrong, I would welcome a message reinforcing matrimony, but aside from the wife's dedication to the husband's art, the relationship at the heart of this film has very little actual heart to it. Perhaps that scene with the landlord intends to indict poverty as a threat to their bliss, but there is zero rallying together against that.

I walk away at the end as if I'd spent an evening with two friends whom I cannot help but sense should not be together. Maybe it is just me, but then does the subplot of the deluded resistance hero set us up to question the happy reunion at the end.

Maybe too much verite ruins the recipe of love, I'd really rather not feel that. As complex as relationships are, as thread-bare as they can get, I feel like a strand of hope somehow is woven between partners.

Effusing from the bottom of a toilet reeks another braindead simplistic dichotomy of woman=good/man=bad gender feminist nonsense, which at this point is fast getting stale.

The male and female characters are simply poured into a pre-made mold and are scraped out without any trimming along the edges (though this movie and its lame characters have no edge whatsoever). The male protagonist is, of course, depicted as an insensitive and egotistical boar, while the female characters are, of course, (almost) flawless and infallible little angels, keeping with the now 30-some year long tradition in movies of presenting this mindnumbingly dumb, and destructive, false dichotomy. Apparently though, this dichotomy flies over the empty heads of the director, writers, and probably most of the (gracefully) few viewers of this movie. If the people who watched this actually knew better, they'd be insulted by this assault on their intelligence and dignity, especially male viewers but any female viewer too who dislikes mindlessly simplistic reductions of who she is as a woman, or maybe just maybe might have an ounce of respect for the men and boys in her life and what the culture is telling them (to hate themselves and regard women as better).

Ironic that a movie thinking it's fighting sexism and doing a good thing to, yet again, prioritize women over men and show the poor little ladies as both the victims and victors of the of big bad men, utterly and miserably fails to see its own sexism in presenting this peabrained sexist duelism of man=bad/woman=good. It also fails utterly and miserably in its own total lack of creative bravery, intelligence, and invention.

Truly great movies of the present and in the future will end this misandric outlook, and movies will not have to be either anti-woman or anti-man.

There's one reason to see this film - an amazing performance of Clotilde Courau. The rest of the film is paled in comparison. The story itself has nothing special to offer. Philippe Garrel's direction is very professional but offers very little character. His special requirement of single take for every scene seems to have inspired the extraordinary performance of Clotilde Courau, so he does deserve credit for it, but nothing else stands out here. And I did find his use of narration, point less and annoying. All other aspects of the film are professional too but falling out flat.

On the other hand, it's worth seeing if only for the superlative performance of Clotilde Courau, which I already mentioned.

One last point, has to do with the name of the movie. In French it's called L'ombre des Femmes, which translates simply as The Shadow of Women. It's a very small difference from In the Shadow of Women, but it's an unnacessary difference that shouldn't have been there.