Good of you to say so! Incidentally, had no idea you were a part-time classicist when I raised the oikos point…

Emma

In the film, Gregoire's women are already in the Parisian polis (until the end, when they leave it). That place where they are located at the beginning of the film is their weekend countryhouse – it it is not where they live. Clemence is leaving the oikos only in the sense that she is coming (although has not yet fully come) of age, a transition which the film depicts with great subtlety (especially in the sequence where she changes her order of a coffee to a hot chocolate).

When Clemence characterises the way that Gregoire has treated his son as abandonment – indeed, as abandonment which she likens to what she is herself suffering – Sylvia herself is quick to leap to her hsuband's defence, and to suggest that the circumstances were more complex than Clemence imagines. Indeed, Clemence's anxious misapprehension (inspired by the malicious gossip that she overhears in a cafe) that her father was involved in an ongoing adulterous affair [minor spoiler alert] is quickly scotched, and the son turns out to be much older than Clemence herself, and now married with his own children. Gregoire is a flawed character, and has made some terrible decisions with catatstrophic consequences – but there is also much about him to be admired (Sylvia, for one, is full of admiration for him) – and I just didn't see the film as attributing either his good or his bad points to anything specifically male about him. After all, his best friend Serge is also his opposite in just about every way – and male.