Le Bruit des glaçons (2010) - film review

Charles is a world-weary middle-aged writer whose sole refuge is to be found in drinks with a high alcohol content.  One day, he receives a surprise visit from a stranger who claims to be the cancer that will one day kill him.  Being a considerate sort, Charles’s cancer thought it only polite that he should get to know his victim before he sets about destroying him.

After an absence of four years (during which he has had ample time to contemplate the state of French cinema and reassess his own contribution), Bertrand Blier made a remarkable return to form with a film which, on the face of it, first sounds like a sick joke carried to ludicrous proportions.  It’s about a man who, literally, gets to have a relationship with his cancer, the latter being represented by an unwelcome houseguest.  Blier has always been something of an agent provocateur with a penchant for the experimental, and it is good to see these traits still alive and kicking in his latest offering, one of the weirdest films about living with a terminal illness that you are ever likely to see. 

Le Bruit des glaçons is Blier at his wackiest and most inspired, a film which, unlike anything he has made over the last fifteen years, bears favourable comparison with his early masterworks.  It has the savagely dark humour of Les Valseuses (1974), the stifling surrealism of Buffet froid (1979) and the wry, twisted humanity of Trop belle pour toi (1989).  Avoiding the stylistic excesses of his more recent films, Blier returns to a simpler mode of storytelling, with a small, perfectly chosen cast and a minimalist mise en scène - an approach which allows his dark humour and flair for characterisation to play to greatest effect.  

Blier’s films are always superbly cast and this one is no exception.  Jean Dujardin has no difficulty shaking off his cocksure OSS 117 persona and is virtually unrecognisable as the burned out writer whose taste for living has all but evaporated.   Whilst Blier does throw one or two other characters into the fray (including a lovelorn housekeeper and her own cancer, played with gusto by Anne Alvaro and Myriam Boyer), the film is largely a two-hander between Dujardin and Albert Dupontel, another superlative performer who gets to play the former’s live-in terminal disease, a role that makes a useful addition to any actor’s CV. 

Dujardin and Dupontel complement one another perfectly and appear so at ease in Blier’s bizarre fantasy world that the film soon acquires a reality all of its own.  Our suspension of disbelief is quickly engaged and remains in force right up until the closing titles.  Le Bruit des glaçons is Bertrand Blier’s most entertaining and stimulating film in two decades, despite the bleakness of the subject it deals with.  Who said dying from cancer is no laughing matter?  Imaginatively scripted and directed with restraint tempered by a soupçon of unbridled insanity, it offers a thoughtful and thought-provoking reflection on sickness and mortality.  The Blier we know and love is back in town.

© James Travers 2010

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