Si c’était lui... (2007) - film review

Valentin is a young man who has lost everything: his girlfriend, his job and his apartment.  Depressed about his present predicament and future prospects, he ends up squatting in his uncle’s flat in an upmarket neighbourhood.   Next door to him lives Hélène, a successful writer, and her son Jérémy.  An independently minded woman, Hélène resents the inequalities and divisions that exist in society and airs her concerns in her books.   Through the intervention of a cat that goes back and forth between them and a son who needs a father, Valentin and Hélène are brought together...

Somewhere, beneath the avalanche of clichés, trite sentimentality and tedious navel gazing, there is a good film struggling to get out here.  Si c’était lui... begins with a very promising premise - a man and a woman from completely different social milieux slowly overcome their prejudices and fall madly in love.  Unfortunately, the story is so obviously taken from a bourgeois intellectual perspective that it just fails to ring true.  Far from identifying, in a humane and intelligent way, with the marginalised and homeless, it wallows in a kind of dated stereotypical view that is frankly offensive. 

Despite a very creditable performance from Marc Lavoine (an actor of great promise who has yet to fulfil his potential), the main male character is little more than a two-dimensional caricature - en embittered down and out who is obsessed with films (and of course he loves Capra).   The only reason why Carole Bouquet’s character is more convincing is because the actress has become so associated with the role of the bourgeois intellectual that she hardly needs to act the part.   Neither actor is given much opportunity to show his or her worth, and so what might so easily have been a great film ends up as merely just another lacklustre romance.

It is hard to imagine that Anne-Marie Etienne had scripted and directed two full-length films before this.  Si c’était lui... feels painfully like a debut feature, showing the kind of flaws that you would not expect from an experienced filmmaker - futile attempts at humour that merely cause you to grind your teeth in frustration (Florence Foresti’s scenes in particular) and so many clichés that the film often looks like a compilation of French films of the past twenty years.  The only thing going for this film is the judicious Bouquet-Lavoine pairing, but even this is not enough to make it worth the effort of watching it.

© James Travers 2011

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