Très bien, merci (2007) - film review

Alex and Béatrice are an ordinary, law-abiding couple who enjoy a well-ordered life in the French capital.  He is an accountant, she is a taxi driver.  They haven’t a care in the world – until the day it all goes wrong.  One night, Alex is on his way home when he sees a group of policemen carrying out a stop-and-search on another passer-by.  The policemen tell Alex to move on.  When he refuses, they take him into custody.  He spends the night in a cell.  The next morning, when he tries to make a complaint, the police bundle him into a van and take him to a psychiatric clinic.   Béatrice manages to get Alex released, eventually, but by this stage he has lost his job, and his future looks very bleak...

Très bien, merci offers a sobering and very timely reminder of where our so-called liberal society may be heading as the State grants ever-increasing powers to the police, ostensibly to make our lives safer.  Only a decade ago, the world which we see portrayed in this film could easily have been mistaken for Communist Russia at the height of the Cold War.  Today, what the film shows us is all too easily recognisable as the one we now live in.

Those who have just woken up to the fact that we may be sleepwalking into the kind of state-controlled dystopia depicted by Orwell and Kafka should get a reality check.  We are already there.  Anyone who doubts that fact has merely to cross the infinitesimal line that now delineates the ordinary citizen from the subject of a lawful arrest.  One ill-judged word to a stroppy copper is all it takes.  Meanwhile, the real villains of society – gangsters, corporate criminals and terrorists – are free to carry on their career of mayhem.

This is the brave new world which Emmanuelle Cuau portrays with such frightening veracity in this, one of the most critically acclaimed films to be released in France in 2007.  This is only Cuau’s second full-length film, following Circuit Carole (1994).  It is the every-day realism of this film (amplified by some convincing performances from Gilbert Melki and Sandrine Kiberlain) which makes it so chilling, in spite of its darkly comedic underbelly.  Très bien, merci is a film that deserves a far wider audience than it is likely to get, a genuinely thought-provoking work whose relevance to contemporary society cannot be overstated.

© James Travers 2008 Write a review for this film...

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