Les Ambitieux (2007) - film review

Julien, an aspiring young writer, succeeds in getting an interview with publisher Judith Zahn.   Without reading Julien’s novel, Judith rejects it, but encourages him to persevere, mainly as a pretext to make him her lover.   By chance, Judith’s mother has just given her a suitcase containing some documents written by her estranged father, a writer and political activist in the 1970s, who died in combat in South America some years ago.  Secretly looking through these writings, Julien has an idea for a best selling novel, based on the real-life experiences of Judith’s father.  Having completed the first draft, he allows the publisher to read it.  Judith’s reaction is not what he had expected...

Compared with many of Catherine Corsini’s recent films, Les Ambitieux is a surprisingly conventional kind of film – an old-fashioned romantic comedy-drama with a pretty banal subject and a fairly predictable storyline.   Yet, coming after such indigestible, overly stylised fare as La Répétition and Mariées mais pas trop (2003), Les Ambitieux will be a far more attractive proposition for most French film enthusiasts.  Maybe it is because it tries less hard to impress that the film is more successful at revealing Corsini’s talent for filmmaking – it certainly shows us a far more mature and insightful director than much of her previous work would suggest.

Whilst the film’s presentation is seductively slick and stylish – at times evoking fond memories of François Truffaut (a director Corsini admires greatly) – the thing that most sells the film are the performances from its two lead actors.  Karin Viard had previously worked with Catherine Corsini on the 1999 film La Nouvelle Eve and has since gained a solid reputation for playing complex tragicomic women juggling dangerous neuroses with powerful inner desires.  Here, Viard is at her near-best, convincingly combining the darker side of someone who is unable to trust her true emotions with a far more sympathetic inner persona.  As the naïve young writer Julien (a kind of latter-day Antoine Doinel), the excellent Eric Caravaca brings to the film a realism and sincerity which makes a somewhat lacklustre storyline considerably more engaging that it otherwise might have been.  What the film lacks in originality and depth, it more than makes up for in charm – arguably Catherine Corsini’s most satisfying film to date.

© James Travers 2008 Write a review for this film...

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