The Second Twin

On the evening of brilliant success, Pierre Montand, a lawyer from Dijon with ascending fame – forty years old – falls passionately in love with a young medical student, Nathalie, met in a “boite” where she is a trainer, job she does every evening to support her studies. This brutal and reciprocal passion is not without raising practically insurmountable difficulties. Pierre Montand is married, and a prisoner of a very prominent social situation. The lovers can only see each other furtively. Nathalie, overwhelmed by these moments that are too rarely granted, decides to break up. One New Year’s Eve, she emphatically signifies this to Pierre Montand. Mad with grief, anger and jealousy, the latter gets drunk, loses control of himself, threatens Nathalie with his revolver and, for several hours, loses his memory. It was during this night of rupture that the corpse of a former “fiancé” of Nathalie was discovered, Montand’s revolver lying near him. The lawyer is suspected and arrested. After eighteen months of imprisonment and a difficult trial, he was acquitted, for lack of absolute proof. This acquittal leaves a deep unease and convinces no one. Montand himself wonders if he did not kill his rival during an insane fit of jealousy. Patiently, he takes up the elements of the case and discovers this “second truth” how atrocious. For fear that he would kill himself with his revolver, Nathalie seized her lover’s gun. And, mad with grief, faced with the reproaches levelled at her by the young student with whom she would have liked to forget Pierre Montand, gun in hand, she fired and killed him. Understanding that Pierre Montand will finally discover the horror of this crime and her cowardice since she has not denounced herself, she flees at the wheel of her car, and suicide or accident dies crushed by a train, at a crossing.
Source : © Fiches du Cinéma