This Is No Time for Romance
1966 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Fernand Dansereau
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
While her husband works and her children play during idle days at a summer cottage, a wife daydreams about the life she might have made for herself, then chooses her marriage as it is when he returns.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A housewife's daydream vs. her actual marriage—sounds like a greeting card, but Dansereau's refusal to punish her for wanting more, or to make her husband a villain, is genuinely weird for 1966; most films would've chosen a side and hammered it.
Dansereau situates this squarely in the lineage of feminist cinema emerging from Quebec's Quiet Revolution, and the formal restraint—how the film lets daydream and reality breathe as equal visual registers—feels like direct conversation with the European art cinema of the moment; a considered, immaculate piece of its tradition.
The hinge is the sound design during the daydream sequences—how Dansereau mutes the cottage's ambient life and lets only her interior voice inhabit the space—a single audio choice that makes the difference between a TV drama and something cinematically alive.