Avant l’aube (2011) - film review

Frédéric, a young man with a troubled past, has the good fortune to be given a job in a luxurious mountain hotel.  When one of the hotel guests disappears one evening and is later found dead, Frédéric suspects he may have been killed by the family who employ him.  But rather than betray his boss, Jacques Couvreur, he makes up his mind to protect him.  Unwittingly, Frédéric puts himself in grave danger...

On the face of it, Raphaël Jacoulot’s second film appears to be a substantial shift from his first, Barrage (2006), and yet as soon as you begin to compare the two films it becomes evident that they have much in common.  Whereas Barrage is an austere social drama, in the tradition of Jacques Doillon and Maurice Piallat, Avant l’aube has all the hallmarks of a coventional French psychological thriller, very much in the Claude Chabrol mould.  And yet whilst the two films look very different, they do in fact embrace similar themes - identity, family relationships, the breakdown of the family unit and class prejudice.  The crime which initiates the drama and sets the protagonists off on their fateful course is a pure MacGuffin, and like all good MacGuffins it soon becomes irrelevant to what ensues.  The focus of the film is the complex relationship between the two main characters - a grouchy, manipulative hotel proprietor and his eager-to-please trainee employee, played respectively by Jean-Pierre Bacri and Vincent Rottiers.  The strength of this film lies not in what it says, but in what it doesn’t say - the bothersome gaps which we have to fill in ourselves.  And there is quite a lot of gap filling to do, as we try to make sense of the two main characters and understand how two people from such completely different worlds can be drawn to one another.  Is it merely self-preservation which drives Jacques and Frédéric to form a Faustian pact, or is there a deeper, more primitive stimulus for their mutual dependency?

The film not only looks and feels as if it might have been directed by Claude Chabrol, it also addresses many of the concerns that preoccupied Chabrol for much of his career, particularly the unbridgeable gulf between the complacent bourgeoisie and the rest of society.  There are some striking similarities with Chabrol’s La Cérémonie (1995) - both films depict an  ordered bourgeois setting thrown into chaos by an incursion from a plebeian outsider with a suspicious background.  And yet, whilst it may cover very similar ground, Jacoulot’s film is more subtle in its approach.  The bourgeois family unit is already primed to self-destruct before the outsider puts in his appearance; like a cracked ornament, it is just waiting for that gentle final tap that will reduce it to smithereens.  This much is evident almost from the outset.  What is more interesting is the way the two main characters reveal themselves through their interactions - the disenfranchised father who needs a son he can be proud of, and the alienated young man who needs a father to serve as a role model and moral guide.  The apparent lack of sophistication in the film’s thriller trappings are belied by the subtlety of the characterisation, and Raphaël Jacoulot shows that not only is he a very competent director, he is also a very keen observer of human nature.

What makes this a particularly impressive film is the stark realism that is brought to it by its lead actors, Jean-Pierre Bacri and Vincent Rottiers.  Bacri needs no introduction - his collaborations with Nicole Garcia, Alain Resnais and Agnès Jaoui have made him one of the most recognisable faces in French cinema today - but rarely has he given a performance of such intensity and complexity as he does here.   Bacri is well-matched by his co-star, Vincent Rottiers, who, at 25, has already established himself as one of the most exciting actors working in France today.  It has been almost a decade since Rottiers made his screen debut in Christophe Ruggia’s Les Diables (2002), but it is only within the last year or two that his career has taken off, after his electrifying turns in Claude and Nathan Miller’s Je suis heureux que ma mère soit vivante (2009) and Xavier Giannoli’s À l’origine (2009).  There is a troubled, dangerous edge to Rottiers’s engaging screen persona which makes him particularly well suited for the kind of role he plays here, the disturbed, and possibly malignant, social outcast.  Jean-Pierre Bacri and Vincent Rottiers are both extremely talented actors, but when they are brought together there is a synergy that can only be described as visceral in its impact.   Yes, there are some creditable supporting contributions from Sylvie Testud (who looks slightly surreal as a woman police officer) and Ludmila Mikaël, but these are pretty well eclipsed by what Bacri and Rottiers have to offer.  Through their tour de force contributions, what begins as a fairly run-of-the-mill thriller soon develops into something far more substantial - an existential drama and study in class alienation of the bleakest and most riveting kind.  Avant l’aube is film that grabs the attention from the off and does not let go until the very last frame, and even then it still holds you in its power, a compelling and deeply troubling excursion into film noir murk and intrigue.

© James Travers 2011

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