Dir. Guillaume Canet, France, 2010, 154 mins, in French with subtitles
Cast: Francois Cluzet, Marion Cotillard, Benoit Magimel
Review by Carol Allen
The story here is about a group of friends, who every year holiday together in a seaside beach house owned by wealthy restaurateur Max ((Cluzet). This year though shortly before they’re due to leave for their annual get together, one of them, Ludo (Jean Dujardin), is badly injured in a serious accident. Much as they claim to care for him, the group decides to go ahead with their holiday but the accident has upset the delicate balance of the personae they have for years presented to each other. The film is not so much about direct lies but more to do with the secrets they have kept to do with their real feelings about their lives and their friends.
First to upset that balance is Vincent (Magimel), Max’s osteopath, a married man and father, who just before the holiday confesses to Max that he is in love with him – an admission which sends Max totally off balance and into paroxysms of homophobic fear. Cluzet, the bereaved husband in Canet’s previous film Tell No One, has a much less sympathetic role here. Max is obsessive, fussing away about the weasels who have invaded his house; a bit of a bully and he never stops talking about how he’s paying for everything on the holiday. His long suffering eco-friendly wife Vero is played by Cluzet’s real life wife Valérie Bonneton. Also in the group are Vincent’s wife (Pascale Arbillot); Marie (Cotillard), who has had many affairs but always runs away from commitment; Eric (Gilles Lellouche), who’s also not great in the relationship stakes and whose current girlfriend Lea (Louise Monot) is getting fed up with him; and Antoine (Laurent Lafitte), who keeps banging on about his ex girlfriend Juliette (Anne Marivin), even though his friends tell him the affair is dead in the water – she’s marrying someone else. Also on hand is local fisherman Jean-Louis (Joël Dupuch), who tells the group a few home truths towards the end, and new age North African fitness trainer Nassim (Hocine Mérabet).
With such a large cast of characters, whom we first meet as a group visiting Ludo in hospital, it takes a while to sort out who’s who and what their relationship is to each other. Although Dujardin as the unfortunate Ludo spends most of the film immobile in a hospital bed, he still makes an impression. He is introduced to us as an irresponsible, partying coke head and the accident itself is shockingly horrific. This group of largely thirty somethings are ostensibly an annoyingly immature bunch, but they still manage to capture our interest and the fact that Max’s chosen intimates are all about twenty years younger than him has interesting implications about this middle aged man trying to hold onto his youth.
The pace of the film is distinctly leisurely and the story, which is a series of incidents linked in a somewhat meandering way, takes a long time to get going. The incidents themselves though are often amusing, as when Max and Vincent find themselves trapped together on a sand bank in Max’s boat, and sometimes touching – Eric putting a brave face on the truth about his latest affair, Marie finding the tables turned on her by her latest boyfriend, the gentle musician Franck (Maxim Nucci), who drops in on them all, and Antoine, waiting in hope all night outside his ex girlfriend’s apartment. And as vacations go, stripping the layers away from your friends and finding out who they really are, while enjoying sunshine and wine in a pleasant environment, is certainly a lot more interesting than working on the tan.
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