L’Un reste, l’autre part (2005) - film review

Whilst Daniel and Isabelle are celebrating their wedding anniversary, they learn that Julien, Daniel’s son from a previous marriage, has had a near-fatal car accident.  Anxiety over his son’s future propels Daniel into a period of crisis, during which he meets and falls in love with another woman, Judith.  Meanwhile, his friend Alain is having a marital crisis of his own.  He is torn between his jealous wife Fanny and his over-demanding mistress Farida.  Can either Daniel or Alain bring himself to start a new life with another woman...?

It’s hard to see how director Claude Berri could go wrong with a cast which includes five of the most highly rated actors in French cinema, but goes wrong he most certainly does in this banal, pretty indigestible concoction of melodrama and farce.  Within the first ten minutes, L’Un reste, l’autre part reveals itself as yet another shallow and rather tedious depiction of mid-life crisis, of the kind that seems to be swamping French cinema at the moment.   You can tell something is awry when Berri has to resort to using a shaky hand-held camera to bring a sense of realism which is so patently lacking in the performances.

There are failings in just about every department, but the real  problem with the film is that the screenplay is just so uninspiring.   Lacking charm, depth and originality, the script fails to make any of the characters more convincing than in a third rate Australian soap opera.  This at least goes some way to explaining the cringe-making spectacle from Daniel Auteuil, who seems to have lost the knack of projecting anything resembling real emotion.   If the first half of the film is only mildly engaging (saved by an entertaining turn from Pierre Arditi, by far the best thing about the film), the second half is a barely watchable show of drama school histrionics, and you are left wondering how it is that actors of the calibre of Nathalie Baye and Miou-Miou can be wasted in such mediocre fare as this.

© James Travers 2007

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