Les Deux amis (2015)
Directed by Louis Garrel

Film Review

Louis Garrel looks set to follow in his father's footsteps if his dazzling first feature as a director is anything to go by.  Having cut his directing teeth with three short films, one of which won the Jean Vigo prix du court métrage in 2012, Garrel Junior shares his father Philippe's interest in keeping alive the spirit of the French New Wave, generously referencing the films of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard as he serves up a tasty mélange of triangular melodrama and piquant comedy, all with a very contemporary feel.  Les Deux amis combines the wistful melancholia of Jules et Jim (1962) with the playful exuberance of Une femme est une femme (1961), and what starts out looking like yet another three-way romance acquires more substance when it develops into a perceptive and rather poignant exploration of male friendship.

Les Deux amis is an updated version of Alfred de Musset's well-known stage play Les Caprices de Marianne, which as every French film buff knows was the original inspiration for Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu (1939).  Garrel shared the scripting duties with the acclaimed writer-director Christophe Honoré, who gave him one of his first important acting jobs, in Ma mère (2004), and subsequently cast him in several other films, including Les Chansons d'Amour (2007).  With Garrel being a highly thought of actor, it is natural that he should star in the film, alongside his real-life friend Vincent Macaigne - the two had worked together recently on Philippe Garrel's Un été brûlant (2011).  The talented and hugely charismatic Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani was honoured with the part of the femme fatale, completing a trio of remarkable performers who had already had fun with the love triangle concept in Garrel's short film La Règle de trois (2011).

More than anything, it is the performances that make Les Deux amis such an engaging and rewarding film, with Garrel managing to pitch it somewhere between his father's more contemplative dramas and Honoré's livelier reflections on love, life and friendship.  Alongside his father's films, Louis Garrel's first feature looks pretty slight but it has greater crowd-pulling potential and offers more laughs than Philippe Garrel's entire oeuvre.  Admittedly, the film's authors don't always strike the right balance between comedy and drama, and some of the more juvenile humorous interludes feel like a careless distraction from the deeper truths that the film is groping towards.  A scene in which the main characters find themselves on a film set re-enacting the May 1968 riots looks like a gratuitous homage to Garrel Senior's Les Amants réguliers (2005), in which son Louis starred.  Welcome as her presence is, Farahani is almost surplus to plot requirements and receives more screen time than she deserves given that the core of the film is concerned with the relationship between its two male leads.

The chemistry between Garrel, as ever the self-confident but likeable poseur, and Macaigne, the perpetual nervy neurotic, is so intense and true-to-life that they could easily have carried the film by themselves.  Their two-hander scenes are the ones that particularly stand out, funny and touching in equal measure.  Friendship is a subject that is clearly dear to Garrel's heart as it features prominently in all of his films to date.  In Les Deux amis, the fledgling director shows that he is aware of what a wonderful and fragile thing friendship can be, more complex, more mysterious and perhaps ultimately more tragic than romantic love, and yet this is something which has been dealt with far less assiduously by cinema.  Les Deux amis opens a door to whole new vistas around the under-exploited concept of bromance to which Louis Garrel seems to be particularly well attuned, and which may well become the cornerstone of his art.  Philippe Garrel is a hard act to follow, but his son Louis's first serious directorial bash is replete with promise.  As someone once said, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Film Synopsis

Clément is a film extra who is obsessively in love with Mona, a young woman who works in a sandwich bar at the Gare du Nord station in Paris. Unbeknown to Clément, Mona is a day-release prisoner who must return to her cell at the end of each day.  Determined not to give up the fight even though the object of his infatuation clearly has no interest in him, Clément enlists the help of his best friend, an aspiring writer named Abel, in a last ditch attempt to win her round.  The plan backfires when Mona falls for Abel, putting in jeopardy his friendship with Clément...