Une vie meilleure (2012) - film review

Yann and Nadia are a couple who are deeply in love.  They finally get to realise their dream of running their own business when they open a restaurant on the banks of a lake.  But their happiness is short lived.  Yann has underestimated how much money is needed to start his new business and he is soon up to his eyes in debt.  The only way out is for Nadia to find work in another country, and so she has no choice but to leave her son in the care of Yann.  As the months pass, Yann’s situation deteriorates even further and he wonders if he will ever see Nadia again...

For his latest film, director Cédric Kahn takes one or two leaves out of Ken Loach’s book and delivers a brutal but highly engaging social drama that could hardly be more pertinent for our times.  Une vie meilleure marks a noticeable shift in style and subject from Kahn’s previous films, viscerally intense romantic dramas such as L’Ennui (1998) and Les Regrets (2009), and darkly introspective thrillers like Roberto Succo (2001) and Feux rouges (2004).  Kahn shows signs of being influenced not only by Ken Loach, but also other masters of social realism, notably the Dardenne brothers and Maurice Pialat.  Whilst his film is uncompromising in its portrayal of the harsh realities of life its power is slightly undermined by a plot that is far too mechanical and a reluctance to embrace some of the cinéma vérité techniques favoured by committed social realist filmmakers.

Whilst Une vie meilleure is perhaps too slick, too mechanistic to be entirely convincing as a piece of social realism, it is nonetheless a compelling and, at times, deeply moving film.  Its power comes mainly from the authenticity that the three principal actors bring to it, particularly Guillaume Canet in what is almost certainly his best screen performance to date.  It takes a while to warm to Canet’s character, Yann.  At first, he comes across as too sure of himself, too wilfully naïve, someone who is clearly heading for a fall.  It is only when Yann’s misfortunes start to snowball and he is sent hurtling towards a financial black hole that we begin to have some sympathy for him.  His situation may be one of his own making, but it is one that we can identify with, and who cannot feel for Yann when he finally wakes up and begins to face up to the reality of the mess he has created?  It is not too difficult to see the wider political-economic allegory that lurks mischievously behind the film.

Of particular note is Canet’s rapport with his child co-star Slimane Khettabi, which has something of the exquisite poignancy of the relationship between the out-of-work father and his son in Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948).  The extent of Yann’s growing sense of despair and his subsequent inner transformation are revealed to us not by Yann himself but by the way he relates to the little boy who is placed in his care, the boy who looks to him for support and comfort when he himself is dangling by a thread.  Leïla Bekhti is far less well-served by the script (her character is not much more than a flimsy deus ex machina) but her performance matches the maturity and depth of Canet’s, reinforcing the popular view that she is one of French cinema’s most promising young actresses.

The film’s subject is certainly topical but, to Kahn’s credit, it tacitly avoids playing the blame game.  It would have been easy to use the film as an opportunity to rant on about the failings of the capitalist system, but Kahn does not do this (except perhaps to comment on how easy banks make it for individuals to accumulate debts that can never be repaid).  Instead, he focuses on the human consequences that can result from some very human failings.  Yann is the architect of his own destruction, not the banks or the social workers, and it is up to him to find a way out.  The better life which the film’s title alludes to is one that can only be attained once the main protagonist has accepted the reality of his situation and has made the commitment to remedy it. This is essentially what the film is about: the realisation of the self through the negation of one’s childish illusions.  Despite one or two obvious shortcomings, Une vie meilleure is a wise and beautifully expressive piece of cinema, one that transcends the grimness of its subject matter and offers hope to us all.

© James Travers 2012

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