A sentimental coup d'état. That is how one might define Costa-Gavras’s incursion into the minefield of melodrama, an operation so disarming as to seem, at first glance, an aporia in the filmography of the great chronicler of political paranoia. Accustomed to his taut and feverish cinéma-vérité—the kind of international machinations, desaparecidos, and show trials—we find ourselves projected into a crepuscular, almost metaphysical Paris, where the only conspiracy afoot is the one that sorrow plots against the soul. "Womanlight" is the thriller Costa-Gavras directs not against a regime, but against existential emptiness; his dossier is not on a political assassination, but on the slow hemorrhage of living after an irreparable loss.

The film, adapted from the novel of the same name by Romain Gary—and one cannot ignore this guiding spirit to decipher the work—orchestrates an encounter that has the finality of a cosmic collision and the desperation of a handhold in the void. Michel (a magnificently stripped-bare Yves Montand, shorn of every last vestige of proletarian seduction or intellectual cynicism) is a man in freefall. His wife is a dying vegetable in a hospital room, a finished love that refuses to die, and he wanders the city like a sleepwalker, awaiting a verdict that has already been written. He meets Lydia (Romy Schneider), and the impact is immediate, violent, necessary. She too is an exile from life: her young daughter is dead, a suicide, and her marriage is a wreck beached on the same shore of despair. They don't seduce one another; they recognize one another. Theirs is a conversation between ghosts desperately trying to prove they are still alive.

This is not the consoling romanticism of Hollywood, nor the French bourgeois elegy. It is pure, distilled existentialism, served in a cracked glass. It’s Camus meeting Cioran in a late-night bistro. The Paris of Costa-Gavras is not the city of lights and lovers, but a labyrinth of neon-lit solitudes, a Hopper-esque non-place where every shop window reflects an absence. The director applies the grammar of his political thrillers to the intimacy of his protagonists: the close-ups are interrogations, the silences are redactions in an official report, the tension is created not by a timer counting down to a bomb’s explosion, but by the constant terror that the fragile bond uniting them might break, casting them back into the abyss from which they came.

To understand the vertiginous power of "Womanlight", one must return to Romain Gary. A writer-aviator, war hero, diplomat, and two-time winner of the Prix Goncourt (the second time under the pseudonym Émile Ajar, in an unprecedented literary hoax), Gary was a man obsessed with the need to invent love as the last bulwark against the absurdity of the cosmos. His characters love not for happiness, but for survival. The "couple-as-sanctuary" is a central theme of his work: two wounded beings who unite to create a micro-universe of meaning in a world devoid of it. Michel and Lydia do not fall in love; they found a nation of two, with its own laws, based on a single article: abandoning oneself is forbidden. Their pact has the desperate sanctity of survivors of an apocalypse.

Yves Montand, Costa-Gavras’s fetish actor, here performs a miracle of subtraction. His face is a map of a weary Europe, his eyes carry the weight of an unbearable lucidity. He does not act out his grief; he inhabits it. But it is Romy Schneider who elevates the film to an almost unbearable level of truth. Her performance is an act of transfiguration. It is impossible, and perhaps intellectually dishonest, to separate her Lydia from the actress's own biography, marked by losses that seem to tragically echo those of her character. There is one scene in particular, where Lydia speaks of her daughter, and Schneider’s gaze projects beyond the camera, into a personal, devastated elsewhere. It is no longer fiction; it is a seismograph of absence. The "womanlight" of the title is not a romantic, lunar glow, but the feverish, almost spectral radiance she emanates, a light that both illuminates and reveals the depths of the surrounding darkness. It is the light of a collapsing star.

Costa-Gavras, the strategist that he is, scatters the film with satellite figures who act as grotesque and pitiful counterpoints to the central tragedy. There is the histrionic dog tamer and his "bridge-wife," a couple who have turned their relationship into a circus act to avoid confronting their pain; there is the taxi driver who speaks to his dead wife over the radio. They are all variations on a theme, outlandish and moving attempts to fill the void, which serve to underscore, by contrast, the terrible purity of the bond between Michel and Lydia. They need no tricks; their only performance is to cling to one another.

Stylistically, the film is one of rigorous classicism, almost Bressonian in its economy of means. Ricardo Aronovich's cinematography immerses the narrative in a muffled atmosphere, where night seems perpetual and day a brief, pale truce. There is not one shot too many, not one superfluous line of dialogue. The film's power lies precisely in this discrepancy: the incandescent, almost hysterical material of Gary's novel is contained within a controlled, almost cold form. This dissonance creates an effect of emotional implosion: the drama does not explode on the screen, but inside the viewer.

"Womanlight" can be read as the photographic negative of its director's political cinema. If in Z or Missing the disappearance of an individual revealed the pathology of an entire political system, here the pathology of individual sorrow eclipses the outside world, rendering it insignificant background noise. It is a profoundly anti-ideological film, shot in the twilight of the 1970s, a decade that had opened with great collective hopes and was closing with a retreat into the private sphere. In this sense, it is a work deeply rooted in its time: the end of utopias gives way to the only possible, fragile utopia, one for two.

Comparing it to other films about loss is an almost obligatory exercise. It might recall the chamber-piece intensity of a Bergman, but without his Protestant frost. It might possess the urgency of a Cassavetes, but without his nervous, improvisational aesthetic. Perhaps the most audacious juxtaposition is with Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour: there, too, two strangers unite their personal and historical wounds, trying to build a present on a past that cannot be erased. But while Resnais's film is an elegy on memory and oblivion, Costa-Gavras's work is a hymn to resistance. It is not about forgetting, but about finding someone with whom to remember, transforming the burden of the past into a shared foundation.

Ultimately, "Womanlight" is not just a detour but a completion of Costa-Gavras's path. It is proof that the most lucid analysis of power and oppression can also be applied to the most intimate of human dynamics. It is a film that tells us that sometimes the most heroic battle is not fought in public squares or courtrooms, but in a hotel room, in the middle of the night, when two people decide that the warmth of another body is the only homeland they have left. A harrowing, necessary masterpiece, whose light, however faint, continues to illuminate our ruins.