Film Review
After his moderately successful return to the thriller genre with
Mains
armées (2012) seasoned director Pierre Jolivet now
has a stab at combining the classic French polar with gritty social
realism, a marriage which other filmmakers have attempted but rarely
with success.
Jamais de la vie
makes a decent fist of presenting what Jolivet terms a 'polar social'
but gets bogged down by its lazy reworking of familiar themes and a
plot that can't help appearing a tad contrived. The social
realist part of the film is a dead-ringer for what we find in
Stéphane Brizé's
Le Loi de Marché (2015):
a factory worker dismissed after decades of loyal service struggles to
survive on benefits as his attempts to find a new job prove fruitless,
driving him to drink and depression. An improbable love affair is
thrown in to add a touch of human feeling to offset the darkness, but
this proves to be as pointless as adding a drop of orange juice to a
punch bowl filled with vodka and gin. Having got the over-egged social
realist miserabilism out of the way, the thriller part of the story
then takes over and the film flips over to another familiar genre,
helped by a second dose of over-baked cliché.
On the narrative front,
Jamais de la
vie offers nothing new and is as let down by its superficial
characterisation as by its unsurprising plot developments. Being
a film noir, the downwards trajectory of the central character - a more
morose than usual Olivier Gourmet (a walking advert for
anti-depressants if ever there was one) - is pretty easy to divine in
advance, and the film ultimately becomes a pure exercise in style,
similar to Jolivet's previous thriller
En
plein coeur (1998). Jérôme
Alméras's slick and moody photography brings a sombre beauty to
the film that makes up for Jolivet's mostly uninspired
mise-en-scène, although the film's main asset is Gourmet's
riveting central performance.
Why Jolivet has to keep stressing the awfulness of his main character's
predicament is unfathomable - one look at Gourmet's dejected features
is enough to make us aware of his inner desolation and the multiple
disasters that have led him to his present state of despair. By
over-emphasising what is pretty obvious, Jolivet weakens his film and
very nearly causes us to lose sympathy with his protagonist, but
fortunately his lead actor wins through in the end. Gourmet's
vivid crises of conscience and determined tussle with a world that
seems intent on crushing him at least make the film worth watching,
although it is too cumbersome and too mechanical to impress either as a
thriller or as a piece of social realism.
© James Travers 2015
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Next Pierre Jolivet film:
Les Hommes du feu (2017)
Film Synopsis
Franck, 52, works as a night watchman at a shopping mall in the
suburbs. Only ten years ago he was a specialised labourer and
union representative, always ready for a fight. But now he has
resigned himself to being one of life's bystanders, and it bores him to
tears. One evening, he notices a four-wheel drive prowling a car
park and senses that something is in the offing. As his curiosity
gets the better of his indifference, he makes his move. At last
he has an opportunity to take his life in hand...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.