Toutes nos envies (2011) - film review

Claire and Stéphane are two Lyon-based lawyers who could hardly be more different.  She is young and enthusiastic, committed to helping those unfortunates who find themselves in debt.  He is older, wiser, but disillusioned with his work and his life.  Under Claire’s influence, Stéphane discovers a new lease of life and at last finds a cause that is worth fighting for...

In his 2009 film Welcome, director Philippe Lioret stirred our consciences with a sobering reflection on the inhumane way in which illegal immigrants are treated when they turn up in our countries, unwanted and unable to fend for themselves.  For his follow-up feature, he makes a valiant attempt to tackle a social theme of comparable import: the cynical exploitation of indebted families and individuals by unscrupulous loan companies.  The subject is certainly a worthy one, and you wonder how it is that, given how widespread the problem of personal debt has become in recent years, so few film directors have been minded to tackle the subject.  The problem is that social realism is not Lioret’s strongest suit and his penchant for lachrymose melodrama prevents him from delivering much more than a lightweight handling of a very serious social malaise.

Loosely based on D’autres vies que la mienne, a critically acclaimed novel by Emmanuel Carrère, Toutes nos envies is more of an old-fashioned weepy than a full-bodied social realist drama.  The story revolves around a good-natured lawyer Claire (Marie Gillain) who, on discovering she has an untreatable brain tumour, decides to dedicate what little time she has left to helping unfortunates who have got themselves massively into debt (by which I mean hard-up single mums and such like, not the large banks or national governments, who can patently look after themselves, by fleecing the tax payer).  As luck would have it, Claire meets another lawyer named Stéphane (Vincent Lindon) and manages to win him round to her way of thinking.  As they succumb to a rather touching platonic love affair, this enterprising duo leave their humdrum lives behind them and embark on a crusade to change the world.   The homespun plot is no more incredible than that of Welcome but whereas that latter film had a ring of plausibility about it (thanks to the extraordinarily truthful performances of the two lead actors), this one just feels tacky and contrived.

It is not hard to see that Claire’s brain tumour is intended to serve as a crude metaphor for the unethical credit business, a morally bogus industry which blights our society like a cancerous scourge and brings no end of misery to those who get caught up in its rapacious talons.  Unfortunately, if Lioret had wanted to divert our attention away from the social issues that his film addresses, he could not do it more effectively than by giving his main protagonist a terrible terminal illness.  Our sympathies are immediately divided between his heroine, who must not only come to terms with her own mortality but also with the effect her illness will have on those nearest to her, and the noble cause she is fighting for.  Both areas would test the resources of any screenwriter and filmmaker, and so it is hardly surprising that they each get little more than the most superficial treatment in this film.  Toutes nos envies is an engaging and at times deeply moving piece of film drama, its shortcomings at least partly redeemed by the captivating performances from Gillain and Lindon, but it has nothing like the raw authenticity and devastating emotional power of Welcome, Lioret’s finest film to date.

© James Travers 2012

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