Le Nom des gens (2010) - film review

Bahia Benmahmoud is an extroverted young woman who takes her political activism seriously.  She has no scruples over sleeping with the enemy, not if she can convert him to her cause.   Her track record of winning converts is unbroken - until she meets Arthur Martin.  A timid forty-something, Arthur would appear to be an easy conquest.  But appearances can be very deceptive...

Michel Leclerc’s second film, after his cute but somewhat pedestrian debut feature J’invente rien (2006), is a surprisingly astute political comedy which was well-received by both the critics and the cinema-going public when it was first released in France.  Whilst it does try a little too hard to get the laughs with its ribald (and occasionally sick) humour, Le Nom des gens does offer a sobering reflection on some important contemporary themes - the value of national identity, the prevalence of racial intolerance and the naivety of those who commit themselves to political causes (albeit with the best of intentions).  Many of the jokes are unlikely to register with a non-French audience, but the issues it addresses, admittedly in a tongue-in-cheek and often provocative vein, definitely should not be lost in translation.  The success of this film in France - it won Césars for its screenplay and lead actress - probably has as much to do with the fact that it has caught the Zeitgeist as its intrinsic merits.  This is not to belittle the film’s artistic strengths.  Le Nom des gens is imaginatively written and directed with great verve, a refreshing departure from the formulaic rom-coms that filmmakers have been churning out lately on both sides of the Atlantic.

The film revolves around two chalk-and-cheese characters: a strait-laced, hyper-cautious bird-flu expert (who happens to have the same name as a well-known brand of electrical appliances - cue gags number one to fifty) and a leftwing political activist who believes that seduction and a packet of three is the best way to win a political argument.  The first is played by Jacques Gamblin, a mainstay of French cinema who excels in this kind of timid everyman role, and Sara Forestier, a raging tornado in thespian form who rocketed to stardom through her appearance in Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’Esquive (2003).  What happens when these two seemingly ill-matched characters meet is entirely predictable, but Leclerc and his co-screenwriter Baya Kasmi manage to disguise the well-worn path quite well by throwing in a few surreal flights fancy and bizarre digressions that prevent us from totting up the clichés. 

The biggest shock is when Lionel Jospin (France’s former socialist Prime Minister - reported missing, believed dead, when Jean-Marie Le Pen knocked him out of the 2002 French Presidential election) suddenly turns up out of the blue and starts fielding jokes at his own expense.  At this point, you can’t help feeling that you’ve been ejected into the Twilight Zone, or at least have had one glass of neat vodka too many.   Jospin’s unexpected cameo turn proves to be the highlight of the film and it underlines what it is really about - which is that politics is only good for us if it is consumed in moderation.  The more seriously the politically minded do-gooders take themselves, the more they believe in the unassailable righteousness of their causes, the more dangerous and divided the world becomes.  Le Nom des gens is a timely reminder that we should all lighten up, loosen the strings on our political corsets and adopt a far less manichean and more adult view of the world’s problems.  Next time, I’m voting for Jospin.

© James Travers 2011

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