Le Pressentiment (2006) - film review

Charles Bénesteau is a barrister who has given up everything - his family, his mistress and his father’s inheritance - to live in a poor working class district of Paris.  Here, in a noisy apartment, he lives a hermit-like existence, devoting himself to thinking and writing in solitude.   He has grown weary of bourgeois society and sees nothing good in humanity.  His siblings cannot understand his actions and mistake him for a misanthrope.  But Charles is always willing to help others in need.  When a stranger turns up on his doorstep and asks for help in divorcing his wife, Charles willingly lends his support.  When the man is subsequently arrested for assaulting his wife, Charles takes in his daughter and hires a nurse to look after her.  Of course, those around him question his motives and Charles does not expect to receive any thanks for his efforts...

With Le Pressentiment, actor Jean-Pierre Darroussin finally fulfilled a longstanding ambition to direct his own film, and does so with surprising skill and maturity.  Based on a 1935 novel of the same title by the little known writer Emmanuel Bove, the film reveals the humanity of one man through the inhumanity of the world in which he lives.   In this world, acts of kindness are regarded with great suspicion and everyone is expected to behave selfishly and unkindly.  The film can best be summed up as a social parody, since it draws our attention to the failings of our society in a subtle tongue-in-cheek vein.  

With its humility, unpretentious mise-en-scène and understated humour, the film matches the personality of its director.   In the many films in which he has appeared, Jean-Pierre Darroussin is often cast as the sympathetic everyman who has a Buddhist-like contentment with the simple life, respectful of others and untainted by malice.  Le Presentiment evokes these same character traits, but with a dark hint of irony.  The central character is a typical Darroussin creation, yet now this ordinary modest man is shown to be an extraordinary hero, a solitary beacon of hope in a world that has gone horribly awry.  

The central character (perfectly played by Darroussin) is a strangely ambiguous individual, someone who both rejects society and yet is impelled to help others in need.  He expects the worst of everyone but he does not condemn others. Ultimately, he resembles a latter-day Jesus Christ whose attempts at redeeming humanity are doomed to fail. since humanity has now passed the point of salvation.   The film’s apparent simplicity belies the complexity of the humanist and social themes that it seeks to address.  A pointedly sour reflection of our present world, Le Pressentiment is as unsettling as it is profound.

© James Travers 2010

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