Arnaud fait son 2e film (2015)
Directed by Arnaud Viard

Film Review

It has been over a decade since Arnaud Viard made his directorial debut feature, Clara et moi, a bittersweet romance starring Julien Boisselier and Julie Gayet that proved to be a moderate success in 2004.  For the past ten years Viard has been afflicted with what is known in the trade as 'second film impasse', unable to come up with an idea that he can sell to a producer.  Whilst waiting for his inspiration to return, he has stuck to his day job as a supporting actor, appearing in such lowbrow fare as the French television series Que du bonheur.  Viard's career as a film director looked to be dead in the water until the fateful day when he had the oh-so-original idea (I don't think) of pointing the camera at himself and making his struggle out of the usual mid-career grove the subject of his second film.  After all, Fellini did it successfully with 8½ (1963), and there are some who regard this hideously pretentious spectacle of grotesque self-indulgence his best film, so why should Arnaud fail where one great Italian maestro succeeded?   Well, in the first place, Arnaud Viard is not Federico Fellini and secondly Romain Goupil had pretty much the same idea for his film Les Jours venus (2015), which ended up being released in France just a few months before Viard's.

Arnaud fait son 2e film is more 'Woody Allen on a shoestring' than 'Fellini in wild excess mode', and that's no bad thing as one of the film's charms is its cheery awareness of its low budget (in promoting the film, the director missed no opportunity to tell the world that it cost only half a million euros to make, a fair chunk of which came out of the pockets of an old school chum).  Viard naturally gets to play himself, an amiable narcissist who is so well and truly stuck in the mid-forties rut that he almost appears to derive some masochistic pleasure from it.  His love life is as hopelessly grounded as his filmmaking aspirations, and he has the additional problem of a sick mother to deal with.  Luckily Rent-a-Cliché is doing good business at the moment (especially in France), so all that Viard needs to fix his flagging libido and inspiration is an unconvincingly cobbled together fling with a much younger woman.  Plotwise, there is very little that is new in this film, and there are probably about a dozen other similar offerings that cover exactly the same ground more competently.  But then, originality was never the defining characteristic of Viard's cinema - his previous film was chock full of cinematic references and still managed to delight critics and audiences.

Viard's second film brims with feel-good charm but it suffers from being a tad too self-referential and struggles to be more than a succession of sketches in which the director listlessly replays his real-life experiences (it would be interesting to know where reality ends and fiction takes over - unless Viard really is a babe magnet, we can take it as read that some of his alter ego's livelier escapades are more wish-fulfilment fantasy than lived experience).  The curse of the second film sticks limpet-like to its director as it has done to many others before him (including Truffaut and Godard) but Viard gets through it with most of his dignity intact.  The fact that Viard is playing himself gives this sophomore effort an endearing personal touch that makes up for the patchy script.  His reflections on life, viewed through the pockmarked prism of mid-life uncertainty, are as light-heated as they are authentic, and the film proves that you don't need a colossal budget or even an average budget or even Jean Dujardin to make an engaging and entertaining piece of cinema.  Let's hope that Le 3e film d'Arnaud will be quicker in the coming (and more imaginatively titled than that) now that his creative constipation seems to have been cured.

Film Synopsis

Arnaud is a frustrated filmmaker in his mid-forties who is in the midst of a professional and domestic crisis.  With one successful film already under his belt, he is determined to make a second, but try as he might, he can't come up with a subject to tempt his producer.  Like any good businessman, the latter will only hand over the readies if he is guaranteed to get a decent return, and so far Arnaud's ideas have ranged from the depressingly uninspiring to the downright ridiculous.  Arnaud's life at home is in a similar rut, and whilst he wants nothing more than to have a child, his relationship with his partner Chloé is so strained that this has even less chance of happening than his making a second feature film. To make ends meet, Arnaud is forced to resume his career as a teacher, and this is how he comes to meet Gabrielle, the young woman who is about to change his life...