The border. It’s a place that separates men from boys, men from women, and even men from themselves. And it’s a place that has to be crossed before a man can …

“I feel like I’ve been trapped in a Terence Rattigan play,” a character named Ludovic Meyer says at one point, not entirely in jest, in Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. If you’re old, or theatrically savvy, enough, the movie may make you feel a little like that yourself.

In the fall of 1970, separatist tensions in Quebec were boiling over. The revolutionary separatist Front Libération du Québec capped an accelerating campaign of violence by kidnapping two politicians, one of whom they killed. Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act and effectively declared martial law. The Canadian Army was sent into Montreal, where—under the direction of local civil authority—they arrested 450 citizens who were guilty only of leftist leanings unrelated to the terrorists. These people were seized without warrants and held without charge for up to three weeks.