Les Apprentis (1995)
Directed by Pierre Salvadori

Film Review

Director Pierre Salvadori followed up his well-received debut feature Cible émouvante (1993) with this amiable buddy movie featuring two prominent rising stars of French cinema, Guillaume Depardieu and François Cluzet, with Marie Trintignant also cropping up in a small but beautifully formed supporting role.  Depardieu and Trintignant had previously featured in Pierre Salvadori's first film and would be reunited for his third screen offering, Comme elle respire (1998), so it is not unreasonable to group these first three films in the director's oeuvre together as a loose kind of trilogy, one that offers a wry but pretty astute commentary on contemporary life in 1990s France.

It is more than tempting to see that Les Apprentis was for Guillaume Depardieu what Bertrand Blier's Les Valseuses was for his father, Gérard Depardieu.  What both films offer is a grimly authentic and darkly comedic portrayal of a pair of outsiders who find it impossible to engage with the false values and attitudes of an uncaring society, and so are driven to lead a freewheeling existence on the margins.  Less blithely shocking than Blier's iconoclastic film, and with central characters that are far more sympathetically drawn, Les Apprentis is much easier to engage with, although it is just as effective in communicating the failings of modern life, with its shallow consumerist trappings and socially corrosive dog-eat-dog mentality.

Depardieu and Cluzet make a formidable casting combination, the sardonic charms of the latter providing a perfect complement to the former's street-urchin loutish innocence.  The buddy movie is a genre that has enjoyed considerable success both in France and America, and Les Apprentis is one of French cinema's more memorable attempts at this kind of film, reminding us how chalk-and-cheese encounters can develop into friendships of the most enduring and meaningful kind, through a shared need for trust and support in a hostile and unforgiving world that is governed far more by greed than compassion.

Guillaume Depardieu received an early boost to his acting career by winning the Most Promising Actor César in 1996 for his much lauded performance in this film; his co-star Cluzet was also nominated for the Best Actor award (but lost out to Michel Serrault for his role in Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud).  Depardieu's subsequent acting career was somewhat compromised by recurrent problems in his personal life (which he attributed to longstanding difficulties with his father), before being tragically curtailed when the actor died from pneumonia in 2008, aged 37.  Just five years before this Marie Trintignant also had her life cut short in tragic circumstance - she died after being brutally beaten by her partner. Somehow the sorry world that Les Apprentis presented us with in 1995 now appears absurdly tame in comparison with the one we actually inhabit.

Film Synopsis

Antoine Parent is an aspiring writer who suffers from depression and a chronic inability to make money from his art.  He lives in Paris and shares a modest apartment with his good-for-nothing friend Fred Rouyer, who appears to be more than content with his life as an inveterate loser.  The two men, both in their early twenties, have difficulty making ends meet and, with little chance of improving their financial situation, it looks as if they will soon be without a place to live.  They agree to set about raising the deposit for a new abode, and this they intend to achieve by breaking into the safe of Antonie's newspaper employers.  What starts out as a well-laid plan rapidly spirals out of control, and the two men discover that the only thing in this world they can count on is their friendship...