Les Petits mouchoirs (2010) - film review

A group of close friends are deeply shaken when a friend of theirs is badly injured in an accident, but they still decide to go ahead with their usual annual holiday by the sea.  However, things will be very different this year.  Their shared concern for their absent friend will make it harder for them to hide their true feelings, and those little white lies will be harder to sustain.  Vincent, a married man, declares that he is in love with his best friend, Max, who is taken aback by this shock revelation.  Antoine tries to win back the love of his life, Juliette, even though she is in another relationship.  Whilst Eric is apparently settled with Léa, he feels an overwhelming urge to test his powers of seduction on other women.   Try as they might, the friends can no longer hide behind a smokescreen of pretence.  The time has come for them to take off their masks and reveal their true faces, as painful as that may be...

Guillaume Canet’s follow-up to his hit thriller Ne le dis à personne (2006) will come as quite a shock to many spectators, showing a dramatic shift towards an altogether different genre and style of cinema.   Whilst Canet deserves to be commended for trying something different, rather than slavishly retread a formula that has worked well for him, the lack of consistency in his work so far is a little perplexing and perhaps implies that he has a long way to go before he finds his voice as a screenwriter and filmmaker.  Les Petits mouchoirs is certainly the most recognisably French of Canet’s films to date, a film that deals with interpersonal relationships, matters of identity and the trauma of mid-life crisis in a characteristically Gallic vein - true to life, sensitive and poignant, but with a fair smattering of irony and humour along the way.  It is the kind of film that is very easy to engage with, since it deals with issues that we can all relate to.  But there is a problem.  The sheer abundance of films such as this makes it harder for its director to make an impact.  There is far less scope for fancy mise-en-scène and it is far more difficult for a director and writer to pull the wool over the eyes of their audience.    Real life is notoriously difficult to fake.  Canet just about gets away with it by virtue of his panache and sincerity as a filmmaker, but it is doubtful whether anything he says in this film has not already been said (at least a dozen times) over the past decade, and said more truthfully. 

On the plus side, the film has a superb cast that brings together some of the most stupendously talented actors working in France today.  The performances are generally beyond reproach, and some (those of François Cluzet, Jean Dujardin and Benoît Magimel) are outstanding.  Also, Canet’s direction shows far greater maturity than on his previous two films, far less preoccupied with showy stylisation and far more generous to his actors, something which helps the film enormously, giving it the kind of raw immediacy that we associate with cinéma vérité.  From the point of view of the acting and direction, this is unquestionably Guillaume Canet’s best film to date.  The only area where the film falls down is its screenwriting, which alternates between peaks of inspired lucidity and genuine human feeling and dips of facile humour and shameless sentimentality.  It is only when the dialogue begins to sound trite that the superficiality of some of the characterisation becomes evident, but, alas, once this has registered one’s enjoyment of the film is severely marred.   Had the script been given a little more care, had forty minutes (at least) been trimmed off the bulimic runtime, Les Petits mouchoirs could easily have been something truly special.  As it is, the film was still a tremendous box office hit in France (the most successful film of 2010), attracting an audience of over 5.2 million.  Whether it will have quite the same impact abroad remains to be seen, but one thing is certain.  Guillaume Canet is starting to make his mark on French cinema, and in a big way.

© James Travers 2011

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