Directed/Written By: Guillaume Canet
Starring: François Cluzet as Max, Marion Cotillard as Marie, Benoît Magimel as Vincent, Gilles Lellouche as Eric, Jean Dujardin as Ludo
And yes, I’m now officially pretentious enough to call French films by their original French titles. Bite me.
Guillaume Canet, primary creative force behind 2007’s incredible Ne le dis a personne, follows up his warm, humane thriller with an equally sentimental, if sardonic and occasionally brutal, meditation on the pettiness and selfishness of humanity.
Having taken cues from Canet’s breakout effort, I expected this film to take its time with its character development before gaining momentum, but mostly it just took its time. Les petits mouchoirs is heavily weighed down by the generous proportion of filler scenes (eg. Marion Cotillard, Oscar-winning actress, hurls vulgarities while being dragged around on a life raft at high speeds). I understand that Canet’s idea was to demonstrate as many instances of dumb fun as possible to make the ending sequence more poignant, but this is something that can be easily conveyed in a third of the screentime dedicated to pointless showcases of cheap thrills. Furthermore, there are just too many scenes of random scenery and of the characters staring wordlessly out of car windows. In movies that thematically explore the oppressiveness of ennui or the aimlessness of transitory routines, these scenes would by default be imbued with depth and poignancy. However, Canet seemingly just incorporates it because it seems like a cool, arthouse chic thing to do. His characters are obviously not thinking about Ludo, their dying friend, and no amount of wordlessness will be able to create any semblance of depth. Not in these scenes, at least. Many arthouse films tend to be slow-moving too, but the difference is that they — the good ones at least — are consistently slow. This film starts out startlingly quick, then immediately becomes artfully slow. That I can deal. It then slowly, deliberately builds up to the climax, and suddenly launches rapidly, aimlessly into the (unsatisfactory) ending. Now that; I can’t. This film has spectacularly poor pacing, and the indulgent filler scenes do much to make it so much more painful that it should be.
I have two problems with this film’s use of music. For one, it contributes nothing to the script. In Sofia Coppola movies, there too are many wordless musical interludes, but they are often the most revealing scenes of all. Coppola has a magical way of turning pop tunes into achingly poignant portraits of underlying emotional tensions; in Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, for example, The Strokes’ ‘What Ever Happened’ reflects Marie Antoinette’s longing for Jamie Dornan’s character, while Aphex Twin’s “Jynweythek Ylow” reflects her sense of claustrophobia and tentative unfamiliarity upon being forced into a role she never really learned how to play. Here, the music instead often feels like superficial attempts at making the filler scenes seem prettier and thus more meaningful. Secondly, music here is too often used to provide some obvious emotional direction to ‘complement’ that of the script, and invariably comes across as insulting in its unequivocal redundancy. Does Canet think so lowly of his audience that he feels the need to teach them how to feel when viewing different scenes in his film? Or does he genuinely think that musical interludes that in no way contribute to the overall quality of the film are artsy and awesome? Who knows.
The best scene in the film is the one when Marie’s bearded hipster boyfriend Elliot comes over and sings for them. It’s perfectly embodies what the film should be: a quiet reflection of their own lives and humanity while Ludo lingers over them like a disembodied spirit. If the film in its entirety were to be homogenized by the same restraint and reflective introspection that grounds this particular scene, it would be so much better.
Although the script does admirably craft a number of believable, complex characters, it still fails to make the two wives and Antoine convincing enough for anyone to care about. Isa’s secret ‘slut’ Internet romps are an immensely interesting development, but Canet doesn’t even address it. How wonderful would it be if Isa and Vincent both realize that their marriage is loveless, and that they shouldn’t need to feel guilty about their own ‘twisted’ fantasies? But Canet completely does away with this, and that’s a disappointing directorial decision. Benoît Magimel is a brilliant actor, as witnessed from his nuanced performance in Michael Haneke’s psychosexual masterpiece The Piano Teacher, but the screenplay reduces him into a caricature of a reborn gay man in a loveless marriage. Admittedly, his bold dramatizations and Francois Cluzet’s looks of horror make the gay jokes more tasteful and humorous than most, but Canet dismisses Vincent as a comic device instead of sensitively exploring his psychology. Compare Canet’s Vincent to Kushner’s Joe from Angels in America. Note how Joe is tentative, conservative and too self-hating to reach out for what he wants. That’s the logical progression for someone who has spent his entire life in the closet or in self-denial. Canet’s Vincent just leaps out with unrealistic, farcical abandon. It’s insulting, and inexcusable. Antoine too suffers from the same problem. His self-indulgent moping in the first half of the movie is used relentlessly as comic relief, then when he finally has a big emotional scene, we’re supposed to empathize? Better luck next time, Guillaume.
The opening scene with Ludo as well as the extended hospital scene fail to bear any real significance; Ludo himself is also not as prominent as he should be. Wouldn’t the film have been more poignant if everyone was secretly affected by Ludo being in the hospital, but was outwardly trying to have fun because that was what they had initially agreed upon, or because they’re heavily in denial about how screwed up their lives are? The ending sequence supposedly proves how much the characters actually love Ludo, but Canet doesn’t make use of that love throughout the rest of the film. Wouldn’t it have been a smarter, more complex irony if Jean-Louis was right about their lies, but wrong about how they felt about their vacation being more important than Ludo or how they were unaware of their own pretensions? Instead, in an incredibly trite, obvious move, he makes Jean-Louis the center of morality, Canet’s de facto mouthpiece, and criticizes (with absolutely no ounce of self-awareness) their choices. Jean-Louis himself never visits Ludo, and Jean-Louis himself has fun with the other characters. If he’s so annoyed by them, why didn’t Canet suggest so before? His sudden burst of lucidity and awareness seems…well, just too sudden. And very forced. How can a director just use a character so nonchalantly without considering the implications it has, or how arbitrary it might seem? I think it obvious that Canet has artistic direction, but he just seems superficial and clumsy here. It’s really very disappointing.
Luckily though, Canet is too good a filmmaker to make a film without any redeeming factors. Here, he proves that with strong source material, he has the sensitivity and awareness to create compelling characters (namely Marie, Max and Eric) that are so brutally spot-on in their construction that they threaten to eclipse the film in its entirety altogether. It’s just a shame that after pouring so much insight (Eric’s fear of singlehood and his semi-awareness of his laughability, as well as Marie’s fear of conflating sex with love are particularly wonderful) into them, Canet just allows his characters to dangle, suspended in a space of perpetual immobility and inconsequentiality. It’s also pretty damn hilarious, and is one of those rare, preternaturally intelligent films that, when it actually does work, manages to strike a balance between humor and drama. The cinematography is characteristically beautiful. Canet uses awkward silences to wonderful effect. ALSO, YOU GET TO SEE JEAN DUJARDIN IN DRAG. Even as a woman, he is still abominably adorable. Ultimately, this movie is an idiosyncratic blend of dysfunctional relationship drama and self-knowing wit, and is smarter and more realistic than most films in the same genre. It just harbours too many disappointments to leave the viewers with much more than ambivalence.
I think the fundamental problem with the film is perfectly embodied in its ending, which is indulgently sentimental, tonally disjointed and aimlessly drowned out by emotional music. It makes the film seem like a deeply moving meditation on the power of friendship, when that’s hardly the film it starts out to be. How can one really appreciate this film if even the director doesn’t know what it’s about?
KevinScale Rating: 3/5