‘Six Days In Spring’ review: A Côte d’Azur vacation proves revelatory in intimate Joachim Lafosse drama

Dir/scr: Joachim Lafosse. Belgium/France/Luxembourg. 2025. 92mins

The latest from much admired, and robustly consistent, Belgian writer/director Joachim Lafosse, Six Days In Spring opens with an elliptically edited sequence sketching out the stressful daily life of Sama (Eye Haïdara), a recently divorced restaurant worker in an unnamed French city. One spring, she decides to take an impromptu vacation with her twin sons to a luxury Riviera villa, where much will change over the course of six days. This is a lighter work than we’re used to from Lafosse, practically a sketch, but has a succinct, understated intimacy.

Haïdara makes a transfixingly elusive lead

The film sees Lafosse returning to San Sebastian competition two years after his heftier, somewhat solemn Daniel Auteuil-starrer A Silence. Here, Lafosse has the commercial disadvantage of working without weighty themes or an attention-grabbing cast, and so it seems unlikely that Six Days In Spring will have substantial clout as an export. At the very least, however it should bring further attention to its lead Eye Haïdara, nominated for a Best Newcomer César in Eric Tolédano and Olivier Nakache’s 2017 C’est La Vie! and recently co-headliner in seagoing romcom A Toute Allure.

On a whim, Saida decides to take her sons Raphaël and Thomas (brothers Leonis and Teudor Pinero Müller) on a break, and drives to Lyon to join her new boyfriend, the somewhat younger Jules (Jules Waringo) – although the boys only know him as their former sports coach. On the spur of the moment, she decides that they should all go down south to stay in a house they know near Saint-Tropez. 

As they install themselves on the luxurious, currently-unoccupied premises, we gradually discover the reasons for Sama’s caution and insistence on using candles instead of electricity. The house belongs to her former parents-in-law but, since her divorce, she’s no longer welcome there – although the boys have spent much of their childhood in this heavenly spot. Nevertheless, things go joyously – until the boys’ sneaky visit to a neighbours’ swimming pool alerts a hostile local, played in inimitably rebarbative form by Damien Bonnard, from Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables, who also starred in Lafosse’s 2021 The Restless. The other familiar face who pays a fleeting visit is Emmanuelle Devos, returning from A Silence, as a well-meaning neighbour who unwittingly lands the visitors in deeper waters. 

The film sustains some themes that have been recurrent throughout Lafosse’s work since his 2006 debut Private Property: among them, brotherhood, marital stresses and the home as hotly contested territory (notably in After Love and 2012’s emotionally ravaging Our Children). The dramatic tension, however, is handled lightly and is not foregrounded as the drama’s primary raison d’etre.

Lafosse, drawing on his own childhood memories, sharply evokes the experience of trespassing somewhere that you used to belong. He also beautifully depicts the dynamics of a newish relationship and a changing family structure, with a key scene involving the boys’ response to their discovery that Jules and their mother are in a relationship (as in several previous Lafosse films, however, racial difference is not itself treated as an issue).

The filmmaker also beautifully catches the mood of a short-lived interlude away from city routine – in which sense he very much earns his use of what might otherwise seem familiar glimpses of the Côte d’Azur. In fact, the film’s French title Six Jours ce Printemps-Là means ‘Six Days That Spring’, evoking the sense of a dream-like moment that the characters might come to fondly recall.

Haïdara makes a transfixingly elusive lead, her reserved poise emphasising Sama’s decisiveness and will, but also suggesting her vulnerability and the weight of a life’s stresses. She works beautifully with the Pinero Müller boys, who register as exuberant, thoughtful and absolutely in their element, while their extended family is completed by Waringo (who was also in The Restless). He plays a tender father surrogate and a sensitive, solicitous lover whose comparative youth brings him closer to the boys but doesn’t make him any less a fit for Sama. 

Regular Lafosse DoP Jean-François Hensgens creates a vivid sense of place, both in the radiant exteriors and in the indoors chiaroscuro, while the late sequence showing the arrival of unwelcome visitors is meticulously composed, so as to suddenly suggest a turn to prison-like enclosure.