Woman in a Twilight Garden (the Flemish title, Een Vrouw tussen Hund en Wolf, literally means, “Woman Between Dog and Wolf”) was shown at the 1979 Cannes and Sydney film festivals.
“Andre Delvaux is Belgium's most gifted filmmaker (the Festival has presented each one of his features over the last twelve years).... The story is set in the Belgian town of Anvers between 1940 and 1950. Lieve (played by French actress Marie-Christine Barrault who was so memorable in Cousin Cousine) marries Adriaan (Rutger Hauer, the Dutch actor seen in Turkish Delight) while Belgium is still neutral. On the outbreak of war, Adriaan goes off to fight; but Belgium is quickly defeated and he returns home fanatically convinced the country should throw in its lot with victorious Germany. He goes off to fight with German troops on the Russian front, leaving Lieve alone. Ostracised by the townspeople because of Adriaan's attitudes, she tries in some way to redeem the situation by hiding a resistance fighter, Francois (Roger Van Hool) even though the prospect worries and frightens her. The two fall in love, but with the end of the war the husband returns to be imprisoned for collaborating with the enemy. Now Lieve has new choices to make in the light of the horrors of the past.” --Sydney Film Festival, 1979.
Delvaux calls Woman In a Twilight Garden an “intimist” film:
“We have set the story... in the stirring years of Flanders so that the echo of uproar and fury gives more power to its intimacy and its terrible fragility. We want to bear testimony to this piece of history that has never been dwelt on by the Belgian Cinema. A sensitive testimony, above all, for it is more a question of subtle differences of memory than of History. The sounds and colours of our memory: a Flemish house and garden but also Antwerp during the war, its silences and its noises, its voices and its music, perceived from this look-out station in a garden by night.”