Petites coupures (2003) - film review

Bruno, a Communist journalist, is going through a mid-life crisis.  His wife, Gaëlle, walks out on him when she learns that he has a taken a much younger woman, Nathalie, as his mistress.  When visiting his uncle, Gérard, mayor of a mountain town in rural France, Bruno reveals that he has no real feelings for Nathalie, prompting the latter to run off in disgust.  Gérard reveals that he also has marital problems.  His wife, who has cancer, has been seeing another man.  To try to wreck the affair, Gérard asks Bruno to take an insulting letter to his rival.  Bruno reluctantly accepts, but on the way his car gets stuck in a ditch in a forest one foggy night.  Arriving at a private mansion to ask for help, he meets Béatrice, an alluring woman who is married to a man with an acute respiratory ailment.  Bruno realises that Béatrice could be the woman of his dreams...

Petites coupures is Pascal Bonitzer’s third full length film, an unusual kind of romantic comedy with a distinctly black underbelly.  Bonitzer is better known as a screenwriter than a director, with an impressive list of film credits, including collaborations with André Techiné and Jacques Rivette.  He has had less success as a director and whilst the films he has directed to date are certainly original and distinctive, none of these has been particularly highly rated by the critics.

On the surface, Petites coupures is an attractive film, but is has two fundamental weaknesses.  Firstly, it is extremely over-plotted, with chance events driving the narrative to a far greater extent than character – which is rather unusual for a quality French film.  Because of this, the film feels painfully contrived, mechanical and hence unconvincing – and the actors have a devil of a job bringing any kind of emotional depth to their characterisation.

The second fault is that the film combines black comedy and arty melodrama in a way that is inordinately clumsy.  Bonitzer should be commended for attempting to create a new style of film, but his approach merely emphasises the extremely artificial feel of the narrative.  Another problem is the overly intrusive music; this would be better suited to a suspense thriller and feels totally out of place in this kind of film, adding an exaggerated sense of drama that feels ludicrous in places.  Knives and guns get thrown into the narrative rather arbitrarily to add dramatic mood and some visceral titillation for no obvious reason.

Whereas most serious French film directors tend to downplay the drama and tacitly avoid cheap plot devices, Bonitzer appears to be obsessively preoccupied with doing the exact opposite.  Consequently, there’s no real depth to this film – it is just a series of implausible events, played unconvincingly, filmed with almost total detachment, with little if anything to engage the spectators’ emotions.  This is a pity, because the location filming is sublime and there are some excellent performances (Ludivine Sagnier’s being particulary noteworthy).  Overall, however, the film is a lukewarm affair, offering a pretty empty experience.

© James Travers 2005

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