Je ne suis pas là pour être aimé (2005) - film review

At 50, Jean-Claude Delsart is tired of life.  He finds it as hard to communicate with his son as with his father, and he lives alone, unloved and unwanted.   His job as a bailiff is taking an ever increasing emotional and physical strain on him and his health is starting to deteriorate.  When his doctor diagnoses he is suffering from acute stress, Jean-Claude enlists in a dance class.  Here, he meets Françoise an attractive woman who is almost twenty years his junior.  She is engaged to Thierry, a schoolteacher who neglects her so that he can write a novel.  Neither Jean-Claude nor Françoise is consciously looking for a love affair and yet they are inexplicably drawn to one another.  Will Jean-Claude’s last chance of happiness end in rejection and disillusion, just like all his other dreams...?

An engaging, well-measured performance from Patrick Chesnais (one of the finest actors working in France today) brings an exceptional degree of poignancy and humanity to this beguiling low-key drama.  The film’s subject may be a familiar one – a solitary older man falling for a fragile younger woman – but Stéphane Brizé’s subtle direction and Chesnais’s heartrending portrayal make it devastatingly effective.  There are echoes of other great directors here - Rohmer, Bergman, Truffaut – in the way that a simple story is told with great sensitivity and meaning.

Je ne suis pas là pour être aimé is only Brizé’s second full-length film, his first being the highly entertaining Le Bleu des villes (1999).   What both films have in common is their striking blend of realism and poetic charm.  The characters and the world they inhabit are portrayed with an almost documentary-style authenticity, and yet the feelings and aspirations of these same characters are shown, just as convincingly, with immense poetry, irony and some humour.  Stéphane Brizé’s work should be better known and anyone who sees Je ne suis pas là pour être aimé will immediately recognise a filmmaker of immense talent and sincerity.

© James Travers 2009

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