A triumph at the French box-office despite the proper lynching it received from home critics, Guillaume Canet's follow-up to the also-incomprehensible hit Tell No One is the most depressingly Gallic flick I've seen in years - and I'm french myself. Indeed, some have said it's the defining movie of the Sarkozy era – self-aggrandising, hyperactive, bling bling and shallow.
Little White Lies (Les Petits Mouchoirs en Français) portrays a group of long-time friends in their late thirties taking their traditional summer holiday in Cap Ferret (an über-posh peninsula near Bordeaux) despite having one of their own lying on a hospital bed after a horrific road accident. Soon, everyone's dirty secrets and half-truths resurface as guilt creeps in, triggering a series of hysteric fits and embarrassing revelations. It's a classic premise for a comedy-drama, seen before in Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill: the death of a common friend as catharsis for collective existential crisis. It's the type of canvas that requires a bit of subtlety from the filmmaker not to turn into a melodramatic cringefest and restraint from the actors not to become an excuse to ham the s**t out of the patronising dialogue.
Instead, Canet decided to go for "SIN-CE-RI-TY" (his mantra during promo interviews), refusing to intellectualise his "most personal film to date" (translation: "I've been staring at my belly button for the last three years"). He shot on his favourite vacation spot and got his wife (Marion Cotillard, yes) and friends to play the main parts. Oh dear. He also decided not to bother editing: the film clocks in above the two and a half hour mark, while managing the extraordinary feat of feeling static while being all over the place in terms of location, narrative developments and story-arcs. Put simply, it's a mess. Did I also mention that every single character is either a self-absorbed bobo idiot – floppy hair, Lacoste polos and flip flops – with insufferable levels of Frenchness (no one kisses their friends that often) or a loud, hysterical woman?
Full review on permanentplastichelmet.com
Little White Lies (Les Petits Mouchoirs en Français) portrays a group of long-time friends in their late thirties taking their traditional summer holiday in Cap Ferret (an über-posh peninsula near Bordeaux) despite having one of their own lying on a hospital bed after a horrific road accident. Soon, everyone's dirty secrets and half-truths resurface as guilt creeps in, triggering a series of hysteric fits and embarrassing revelations. It's a classic premise for a comedy-drama, seen before in Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill: the death of a common friend as catharsis for collective existential crisis. It's the type of canvas that requires a bit of subtlety from the filmmaker not to turn into a melodramatic cringefest and restraint from the actors not to become an excuse to ham the s**t out of the patronising dialogue.
Instead, Canet decided to go for "SIN-CE-RI-TY" (his mantra during promo interviews), refusing to intellectualise his "most personal film to date" (translation: "I've been staring at my belly button for the last three years"). He shot on his favourite vacation spot and got his wife (Marion Cotillard, yes) and friends to play the main parts. Oh dear. He also decided not to bother editing: the film clocks in above the two and a half hour mark, while managing the extraordinary feat of feeling static while being all over the place in terms of location, narrative developments and story-arcs. Put simply, it's a mess. Did I also mention that every single character is either a self-absorbed bobo idiot – floppy hair, Lacoste polos and flip flops – with insufferable levels of Frenchness (no one kisses their friends that often) or a loud, hysterical woman?
Full review on permanentplastichelmet.com