Les Regrets (2009) - film review

Mathieu Lievin is a 40-year-old architect living in Paris.  When he learns that his mother has been hospitalised, he makes a hasty return to the provincial town in which he grew up.  In the street he has a chance meeting with Maya, his childhood sweetheart whom he hasn’t seen for 15 years.  She is accompanied by a man and a young girl and says nothing to him.  A few hours later, Maya telephones Mathieu at his old family home and invites him to call on her.  Mathieu hesitates for a moment and then agrees to see her.  Their feelings for one another are as intense as ever, but surely it is too late to start over again... ?

After his brief and totally unexpected excursion into childhood fantasy with L’Avion (2005), director Cédric Kahn returns to terra firma with a bang in his latest film, an intense romantic drama which combines the overt eroticism of his earlier L’Ennui (1998) with the eerie Hitchcockian feel of his Feux rouges (2004).  On paper, Les Regrets is a banal story of rekindled passion involving two slightly pathetic souls who, having gone their separate ways after an adolescent fling, cannot resist having a second bite of the cherry in middle-age.  The film would have been a pretty bland affair were it not for Kahn’s distinctive thriller-esque mise-en-scène, which brings a visceral edge to the proceedings, and the remarkable performances from his lead actors, Yvan Attal and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi.

If there is a running theme to Kahn’s increasingly diverse oeuvre it is the perversity of human nature.  This is perhaps most apparent in Bar des rails (1991) and L’Ennui, where the central characters pursue sexual adventures almost in spite of themselves, as an instinctive reaction to the traumas of adolescence and mid-life crisis.  In Les Regrets, the main characters pursue a similarly perverse romantic liaison, one that is propelled not by genuine love but by an attempt to recapture the past and live the life that has been rejected.  The woman, Maya, is visibly torn between two realities - her present lacklustre life and an alternative in which she believes she can relive the one true love of her life.  Of course, this dual existence cannot be sustained indefinitely and Maya will again have to decide which path to follow, if either.

Kahn could hardly have chosen two better actors than Yvan Attal and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi to play the introverted Mathieu and huskily sensual Maya.  Tedeschi is no stranger to this kind of role, the fragile, slightly neurotic dreamer who has next to no control over her dangerous passions and inevitably ends up looking like a martyr dangling from the cross of thwarted desire.  Attal is a more surprising choice, better known for his more extrovert macho roles, but proves to be a perfect complement to Tedeschi, mirroring her very visible emotional conflict in a darker, more subtle way.  More than anything, it is the riveting performances from these two great actors that makes Les Regrets Cédric Kahn’s most intense, most cruel and most moving film to date.

© James Travers 2010

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