Le Bruit des gens autour (2008) - film review

The Festival d’Avignon, one of the cultural highlights of the French calendar, is an appropriate meeting point for artists, romantics and all manner of emotionally disturbed individuals.  Two actors who have just split up have to play a couple who are hopelessly in love...  A young singer is on the verge of killing herself...  Add to this a depressed author, a tyrannical dancer and a stroppy technician...  It takes all sorts to make a show...

Le Bruit des gens autour starts from a promising premise - the complex lives of the participants in an arts festival becomes a sideshow that is more interesting than the main event - but fails in the delivery.  The film may have a talented cast, it may have been co-scripted by Christope Honoré, a scénariste of some standing, but none of this prevents it from feeling like reheated and unseasoned leftovers - a compendium of situations that have been done to death by other filmmakers in recent years, without any real focus or coherence.  There are a few moments when first-time director Diastème takes us by surprise and appears to offer something new, but these are fleeting and far between.  Despite one or two standout performances (Todeschini is excellent, as ever), none of the characters gets much beyond the merely superficial, and the occasional bouts of over-egged histrionic excess do little for the film’s credibility.  Although Diastème shows some promise in his mise-en-scène, which offers one or two genuinely inspired touches, the film is let down by a mediocre script and a general feeling of aimlessness.

© filmsdefrance.com 2011

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