Le Coeur des hommes 2 (2007) - film review

Jeff invites his three friends Alex, Antoine and Manu to spend a holiday with him at his villa in the south of France.  Jeff wants to sell the villa and settle in Paris, but his friends persuade him to keep it as a holiday retreat for the four of them.   As it turns out, this proves to be not a bad idea.  Back in Paris, the four men experience turbulent changes in their love lives.  Antoine falls madly in love with a woman he sees in the street.  Jeff is beginning to feel the strain of being attached to a much younger woman.  Manu is stunned when his mistress reveals she intends to move with her family to another region of France.  Alex is faced with an acrimonious divorce when his wife realises that he has been playing the Don Juan role too earnestly for her liking...

Four years after his hit debut feature Le Coeur des hommes, writer-director Marc Esposito reunites the four stars of that film for an equally popular sequel.   If the first film was a tasty déjeuner sur l'herbe, this follow-up is more a collation froide, one that offers the same cuts and friands, but served cold and overly reliant on pickles and other gastroenteritis-inducing additives to pep things up.  The fact that most critics loathed the film, and expressed this loathing quite vehemently in the French press, did not prevent it from being the fifth most-watched French film of the year in France, with an audience of 1.8 million (which is probably enough to guarantee at least another five sequels and a mini-series).

Le Coeur des hommes 2 does have one glaring deficiency, which is that it often resembles a very bad French soap opera (it is worth noting that French soap operas are generally so execrably bad that they should be outlawed by international law).  The fact that the characterisation and situations tend to veer towards the egregiously superficial would have been more bearable if Esposito had shown a little more inventiveness and daring in his direction, instead of doing a good impression of a film student who is pathologically afraid of making too many waves with his first film.  The film is not quite so soul-crushingly offensive as some reviewers will have you believe, but don’t expect it to be as rewarding and intellectually stimulating as Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu or as enlightening as the BBC weather forecast.

The film’s one redeeming feature is its principal cast, a talented brood who are clearly not too distressed by having to deliver the kind of lines that would cause some actors to choke on their own phlegm.   (Phlegm choking is an occupational hazard for French thesps, since they apparently have a larger than average quantity of phlegm to play, or rather choke, with).  Bernard Campan, Gérard Darmon and Jean-Pierre Darroussin give great value and bring some glimmer of authenticity and respectability to the proceedings.  Even the singer-turned actor Marc Lavoine (who is not remotely in the same league as his illustrious co-stars) turns in a commendable performance that will have you wondering whether one day he might not pick up a César (well, someone has to hand the award to the recipient).

If the quality of the acting is the film’s main strength, its weakness is surely the script.  The only one of the various story strands which rings true is that involving Jean-Pierre Darroussin.  By contrast, the subplot that tests Marc Lavoine’s acting skills to breaking point belongs to the aforementioned soap opera class of popular entertainment and is as convincing as a French politician promising to support the Americans and British in a  future invasion of Iran/Korea/China/Belgium (delete as appropriate - my money’s on Belgium). 

Le Coeur des hommes 2 may not be to everyone’s taste but it if you’re in the mood for a substantial dose of low-grade soap, intravenously fed to you by a team of amiable good-looking middle-aged actors, this may hit the spot.  Otherwise, it is (if you’ll excuse the feeble attempt at humour) Temps perdu...

© James Travers 2010

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