"Suite Francaise" unveils a first look (via The Playlist) at Michelle Williams as a young Parisian woman who develops feelings for a handsome German officer while her husband heads off to war. The film, directed by Saul Dibb with him also writing the script along with Matt Charman, is set in 1940s France, AceShowbiz reports.

While her husband is away during the early years of German occupation of France, Williams' character, Lucile Angellier, is left under the supervision of her domineering mother-in-law. As the German officer, Bruno, is assigned to stay at their home, a powerful love draws them together and traps them in the tragedy of war.

On board for supporting roles are Matthias Schoenaerts, Alexandra Maria Lara, Margot Robbie, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ruth Wilson and Sam Riley.

Having wrapped its production, the $20 million budgeted drama is based on Irene Nemirovsky's best-selling novel of the same name.

"Born in Ukraine, Irène Némirovsky had lived in France since 1919 and had established herself in her adopted country's literary community, publishing nine novels and a biography of Chekhov. She composed " Suite Francaise" in the village of Issy-l'Evêque, where she, her husband and two young daughters had settled after fleeing Paris. On July 13, 1942, French policemen, enforcing the German race laws, arrested Némirovsky as "a stateless person of Jewish descent." She was transported to Auschwitz, where she died in the infirmary on Aug. 17.

The date of Némirovsky's death induces disbelief. It means, it can only mean, that she wrote the exquisitely shaped and balanced fiction of "Suite Francaise" almost contemporaneously with the events that inspired them, and everyone knows such a thing cannot be done. In his astute cultural history, "The Great War and Modern Memory," Paul Fussell describes the invariable progression — from the hastily reactive to the serenely reflective — of writings about catastrophes: "The significances belonging to fiction are attainable only as 'diary' or annals move toward the mode of memoir, for it is only the ex post facto view of an action that generates coherence or makes irony possible."

...She wrote what may be the first work of fiction about what we now call World War II. She also wrote, for all to read at last, some of the greatest, most humane and incisive fiction that conflict has produced, a review published in The New York Times said.