Hello Goodbye (2008)

Hello Goodbye is a French film comedy first released in 2008, directed by Graham Guit.  The film stars Fanny Ardant, Lior Ashkenazi, Jean Benguigui, Gérard Depardieu and Gilles Gaston-Dreyfus.  Our overall rating for this film is: mediocre.


Alain and Gisèle are a happily married couple who, now into their fifties, lead a comfortable existence in Paris.  Life could not be better for them but, on the spur of the moment, Gisèle decides that she wants to up sticks and settle in Israel, to recover her Jewish roots.  Alain eventually gives into this mad whim but once the couple have arrived in Israel they find it is anything but the Promised Land...

After his macabre thriller Le Pacte du silence (2003), director Graham Guit takes us off into an entirely different realm of the imagination, once more aided and abetted by living legend Gérard Depardieu.  Here, Depardieu is partnered with Fanny Ardant with whom he had previously worked on François Truffaut’s La Femme d’à côté (1981) and Anne Fontaine’s Nathalie... (2003).  As on those occasions, the two actors work together incredibly well but are ill-served by a dismal script, a cliché-sodden mess that tries a little too hard to extort laughs from its audience.

Things get off to a bad start when a bourgeois couple decide to swap their chic Paris apartment for a squat in the less salubrious area of Tel-Aviv, apparently to rediscover their Jewish roots.  Even if you are able to swallow that crazy premise then your credulity will be tested to destruction by what follows.  When male circumcision becomes not only the object of some pretty grim humour but an entire plot digression you know that something is seriously wrong.  The only reason to watch this travesty is to be reacquainted with Fanny Ardant’s flair for comedy, which deserves to be exploited more than it has been.  In every other sense, the film is a complete misfire.

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