The Innocent (L'innocent)

Actor/director Louis Garrel

Garrel with Roschdy Zem and Jean-Claude Pautot

Jean-Claude Pautot

Noémie Merlant and Louis Garrel

THE INNOCENT (L'innocent)          B                                                                                     France  (99 mi)  2022  ‘Scope  d: Louis Garrel

An offbeat comedy caper that is more of a character study, while also veering into freewheeling family dysfunction and a heist drama, adapting the director’s own screenplay of mixed genres, co-written by French crime novelist Tanguy Viel and screenwriter Naïla Guiguet, the first without the helping hand of iconic French novelist/screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriére, a longtime collaborator with Luis Buñuel, where all four of Garrel’s films feature him playing an alter-ego character named Abel, a somewhat bumbling Antoine Doinel figure who offers an existential window into contemporary times, though there is no apparent link between films.  The absurd, outlandish nature borders on farce, while it also plays into a crime thriller genre, with the director apparently having fun at his own expense, playing an overly morose character who rarely smiles and is a pain in the ass most of the time, allowing the other characters to shine.  Placing himself as the weakest link in a superb cast that simply runs circles around him talent wise is an interesting choice, and takes guts to do that, but it leaves the center of the picture somewhat deflated by the blind, short-sidedness of Abel (Louis Garrel), who’s a bit of a jerk, with the audience quickly losing patience with him, exhibiting little sympathy for just how obnoxious he really is.  The other surprise is the use of such cheesy, synthesized music, Gianna Nannini - I maschi (1988) HD 0815007 - YouTube (5:57) or Craig Armstrong: Let's go out tonight YouTube (6:01), a throwback to films of the 70’s and 80’s, with the inclusion of fades to black, split screen, and iris shots, yet the generic sound lacks any real inspiration, feeling like a lost opportunity.  So there’s a lot not to like in this film.  On the other hand, the supporting cast is utterly superb, opening with a scene of an imposing middle-aged man delivering an intense monologue about death while loading a gun, setting a disturbing tone, yet when an audience bursts out into applause, enthusiastically lauding the performance, we’re in for a surprise, as it features Michel (Roschdy Zem) as an incarcerated inmate, while the prison drama instructor, Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg), is wildly passionate about his performance, where we sense a deeper connection between the two.  Later we see the two of them happily getting married inside the prison, where everyone’s in a festive mood, even the guards, except a glum Abel, a celebration abruptly cut short due to visiting hours.  This is a tribute to Garrel’s mother Brigitte Sy, who spent twenty years working in prison theater workshops, and did marry one of her students in prison, perhaps best known for her longstanding collaboration with the filmmaker’s father, Philippe Garrel, an uncompromising arthouse director who frequently made stylishly melancholic films starring his son, like REGULAR LOVERS (2005), A Burning Hot Summer (Un été brûlant) (2011), and Jealousy (La Jalousie) (2013).

While the film remains ambiguous about who or what the title refers to, where it may simply be the spirit of the film, Abel’s job is giving tours to children at the aquarium, where his free-spirited work associate is Clémence (Noémie Merlant), who is the real surprise in this picture, as it’s a side of her we haven’t seen before.  Appearing more recently in Céline Sciamma’s 2019 Top Ten List #2 Portrait of a Lady On Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu), a film currently listed at No. 30 in BFI Sight and Sound’s poll for The Greatest Films of All Time, Jacques Audiard’s 2021 #6 Film of the Year Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades, Paris 13e), and Todd Field’s 2022 Top Ten List #2 Tàr, Merlant has been a rising star in arthouse films, winning the César for Best Supporting Actress in this film, which allows her to extend her range into absurdist comedy, blending high drama into comic farce, adding plenty of personality missing in Garrel’s character, actually becoming the driving force of the picture from behind the scenes.  The central relationship between Sylvie and Michel is initially adorable, as Sylvie is totally smitten, head over heels in love, where the world literally revolves around her man, who just happens to be serving a five-year stretch for grand larceny, offered a second chance of love late in life, as he has resurrected all her hopes and dreams that she’d given up on.  Abel, on the other hand, is a constantly brooding sad sack draining all the life force out of everyone, as he’s suspicious of his mother’s new lover, thinking he’s just another in a long series of his mother’s failed relationships with convicts, while suffering from his own trust issues.  He’s already despondent due to his role in the death of his wife, as she died in a car accident while he was driving, something that has haunted him for years, but Clémence, his wife’s best friend, routinely has to remind him how ridiculously happy his mother is.  Why would anyone crush her dreams?  Nonetheless, the film turns on a dime into a crime caper, with Abel following the recently released Michel like a bungling private eye, becoming obvious wherever he goes, where his amateurishness is overshadowed with just how pathetic his protective instincts are, sensing Michel is lying about getting help from “a friend” in starting a new life, as he and his wife plan to open up a flower boutique together.  It’s a romantic turn of events going from a master thief to a flower peddler, and it’s more than Abel can bear, especially after finding a gun and seeing Michel still running with his old crowd, so he eavesdrops on their clandestine meetings taking place, which Michel lies about, claiming he’s working at a furniture store.  The lies are fast and furious, with Clémence wholeheartedly jumping into help mode, appealing to Abel not to tell his mother, thinking perhaps their own intervention might help set things straight.  Predictably, chaos ensues.

Shot in Lyon, the city of the Lumière brothers and Bertrand Tavernier, a fundamental reference point for French cinephilia, where the French are responsible for some of the best heist scenarios of all time, from Jules Dassin’s RIFIFI (1955), Claude Sautet’s Classe Tous Risques (The Big Risk) (1960), to Jean-Pierre Melville’s BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956) and LE CIRCLE ROUGE (1970).  Giving thanks to French film director Jacques Audiard, something of a specialist in prison and crime dramas, also getting help from actor Jean-Claude Pautot, a former figure in organized crime who spent decades in jail as a habitual thief and bank robber, thought to be a shining example of rehabilitation gone right, cast as Michel’s crime partner in the film, even appearing on the red carpet in Cannes, but he was rearrested in Spain on drug trafficking charges at the end of 2022 and is currently back in prison.  The film goes to great lengths to expose the lies people will tell, as Abel and Clémence get roped into Michel’s hare-brained scheme, with Clémence thinking this will help Abel break out of his doldrums by actually taking part in Michel’s planned heist, which, of course, is foolproof.  Having heard that before, this is a familiar path straight into the heart of trouble, but taking a novel turn, Michel puts the two of them through relentless rehearsals, not in what to do, but in how to do it, as they must be authentically convincing in creating a distraction, giving the real criminals more time to pull off the theft.  A clever variation on fact and fiction, a bystander must be convinced of their emotional sincerity play-acting a lover’s quarrel in order to be reeled in.  Admittedly, this clever twist is unique and highly original, with Merlant pulling off a master class of diversionary maneuvers in a magnificent sequence that quickly turns sour, where her performance is nothing less than riveting.  What’s supposed to be just for fun seems all too real, as the actors are actually drawn into their own lurid performances, uncertain whether they’re telling the truth or playing a part, taking a delightful detour into romantic sparks and full-blown drama.  The film goes a little off the rails, with screwball comedy turning into a madcap heist gone wrong, becoming more exaggerated by the minute, yet as weird and wacky as it gets, the closer the two would-be actors become in their own developing partnership.  This pack of lies seem to have drawn them together, yet it completely derails the existing romance of Michel and Sylvie, as she refuses to be deceived.  There are memorable moments where crime and romance intersect, joyfully paying homage to Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1959) and the French New Wave, with Garrel actually playing Godard in Michel Hazanavicius’ film GODARD MON AMOUR (2017), while this is partly inspired by events in the director’s own life, becoming a witty and beautifully constructed oddball mix of family, comedy, romance, suspense, and action in this quintessentially French film that aims to please, generating an enthusiastic response when it premiered out of competition at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, while also receiving a César for Best Original Screenplay.  The characters are memorable, taking us places we never expected.  An eminently playful film with commercial aspirations, it probably plays better in a theater full of delighted patrons, but this is more amusingly offbeat than good.    

Deception (Tromperie)

 

Director Arnaud Desplechin

Desplechin with Denis Podalydès

Desplechin on the set with Léa Seydoux

DECEPTION (Tromperie)                  B+                                                                               France (105 mi)  2021 ‘Scope  d: Arnaud Desplechin

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. […]  What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself – a troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actors […] that forms my repertoire.  But I certainly have no self independent of my imposturing, artistic efforts to have one.  Nor would I want one.  I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

—Philip Roth, The Counterlife, 1986

Desplechin has always been a literary filmmaker, making a living on fast-paced, yet natural sounding dialogue, where this film is no exception, cleverly adapted from Philip Roth’s 1990 autobiographical novel, his first use of “Philip Roth” as a fictional character, coming during the decade of the Reagan/Bush years defined by the fall of the Berlin Wall, ushering in the era of the Clintons and the Internet.  Written entirely in the form of conversations, eschewing any narrative for the theatricality of straight dialogue, like a stream-of-conscious stage play, Desplechin and his recent cowriter Julie Peyr have collaborated before on 2015 Top Ten Films #7 My Golden Days (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse), which won a César award and Lumières award for Best Director, and the less successful psychoanalysis drama Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (2013).  In this film, set in London in 1987, it’s never hard to distinguish who’s speaking, dominated by the central character Philip Roth (Denis Podalydès), a middle-age American writer living in exile, describing himself as “a talk fetishist,” who is always gathering material for his next novel, gleaning information from his unhappily married female lover (Léa Seydoux), known only as the English Lover (perhaps a reference to Roth’s wife, British actress Claire Bloom), or several former flames, like Jana (Madalina Constantin), a Czech writer caught up in the insidious drama of the Cold War, Rosalie (Emmanuelle Devos), an American woman stricken with cancer (likely based on American novelist Janet Hobhouse, who died at the age of 42 from cancer), a former student from his teaching days at a university (Rebecca Marder), and his long suffering wife (Anouk Grinberg), as the studio that serves as his refuge where he writes is also the site of his affairs, mixing carnal pleasure into his profession, treasuring every word he hears, where astute listening leads to a private notebook of collected notes.  Told with chapter headings, the conversations occur before, during, and after sex, or in a restaurant, or bar, including flashbacks and advancing time lapses, and even includes an imaginary sequence where he is placed on trial by an all-female court for his overt hatred towards women, with prosecutorial suggestions that the women in his works are all vicious stereotypes.  What this attempts to unearth are the “rude truths” of daily existence, including the worldwide onslaught of anti-Semitism and his lifelong struggle of being an unapologetic Jew, with Roth becoming obsessed with observing the smallest details in his lover’s life, attuned to their most intimate thoughts, the moments of hesitation, or regret, the avalanche of painful revelations, while also maintaining an erotic fascination in the present which seems to keep the home fires burning.  All the characters seem to be in a state of flux except the writer, who has found his place, but at a price, as he feels lonely, exiled from the outside world, so he hungers for the stories these women tell and transcribes their words.  Desplechin used this Roth text in a DVD bonus of KINGS & QUEEN (2004), acting the final scene with Emmanuelle Devos, which was actually seen by the author, who encouraged him to do a cinematic adaptation of the book.    

Such an improvement on Roth’s other screen adaptations, Ewan McGregor’s American Pastoral (2016) or Robert Benton’s THE HUMAN STAIN (2003), but Isabel Coixet’s ELEGY (2008) about a 62-year-old literature professor having an affair with a 24-year-old student certainly hits the mark, becoming a fascinating mix of cultures, getting a feminine perspective from the Spanish duo of Penélope Cruz and Coixet.  Shot during the onset of the pandemic in France, with the slimmest of budgets, where the lockdown mirrors the seclusion of the writer, this film is succinctly fluid, a marvel of kinetic energy, rarely more than two people onscreen at any time, racing through the scenes like a director in the thrall of quick film shoots.  While the subject is middle age, it never grows maudlin or sentimental, exploring their lives in minute detail with a rigorous intellectual curiosity and explosive emotionality, as if eavesdropping into private realms, where both are equally fascinated by this psychological dissection, confessing the lies they tell others, or themselves, revealing the concerns they have about being perceived as weak or too strong, what they’ll tolerate or won’t, as they vent about the multiplicity of flaws in their partners, yet refuse to leave, as the English Lover declares, “The more trivial the defect the more anger it inspires.”  Gorgeously shot by Yorick Le Saux, who has previously worked with Olivier Assayas on 2014 Top Ten List #3 Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper (2016), and Non-Fiction (Doubles Vies) (2018), Claire Denis on High Life (2018), and Greta Gerwig on Little Women (2019), the lighting is especially impressive, creating a luminous private domain, which only frames and accentuates the rapidity of thought that we experience, where it has the feel of a theatrical stage play, quickly moving between scenes, where the common denominator is emotional authenticity and a lack of pretension, shot through a prism of desire, where Seydoux in particular truly excels in this regard, showing an ease of emotional restraint while expanding her astonishing range.  While she’s always had a sensuous onscreen presence, her probing self-reflective qualities are what stand out, exhibited by an intellectual curiosity balanced against her vulnerability, which are a perfect match for this writer, often seen matching wits, which is what makes her such an alluring muse, as he never tires of being with her.  While they banter about divorced friends, ruined children, and her husband who’s carrying on an extramarital liaison of his own, with a “tootsie” no less, one of the interesting aspects of exposing these personal revelations is viewers can only imagine what these women’s lives are like offscreen, as we never see any of them on their own, living in separate worlds, where they may be figments of the imagination, for all we know, only appearing in brief vignettes, like apparitions, always making reference to their actual lives, where artistic license is literally excavating the essence of who they are and what they have to say, as nothing is off limits in the creative world of fiction, which becomes a kind of utopia, where the author imagines himself, outside his novel, having a love affair with a character inside his novel.

While Philip Roth as the womanizing central protagonist is anything but a philandering hero, the film becomes an exposé on the deception of masculinity and the privilege it brings, as men have the capriciousness to have affairs, commit adultery, and otherwise stray from their empty and disappointing marriages as if it’s a God-given right, with society at large turning a blind eye and never holding them accountable, while women are held to a different standard, with Madame Bovary (originally attacked for obscenity) being the moral handbook on how society condemns women more ruthlessly than men, often turning them into something they’re not, degrading their position and stature, having committed moral sins that are overlooked in men.  This film explores that shadow existence of men, that deceitful web of desire that may as well be invisible, as these sins have been ignored throughout history and never recorded alongside the many accomplishments.  Where does this entitlement come from?  In the surreal court proceeding with the author on trial, the judge mockingly asks, “Can you explain to the court why you hate women?”  It carries with it the absurdist rendering of Kafka, whose portrait hangs on the wall of the office by Philip’s desk, where the protagonist finds himself in foreign territory, an alternate imaginary universe where he is judged accordingly on this day of reckoning, guilty of sexism, misogyny, woman abuse, slander of women, denigration of women, defamation of women, and ruthless seduction, crimes he squeamishly denies, each carrying the most severe penalties.  Pleading artistic license, that a writer uses his imagination to portray real events, just like Shakespeare, something that has been part of the human condition since the invention of language, he is guilty nonetheless, having intentionally published books that cause women suffering.  Just like politicians, artists through the years have learned to become more and more manipulative, where the underlying motive at the heart of a novel is deceit, as the writer intends to deceive the reader into believing things that may have never happened.  That is the nature of their craft.  Having affairs with the wives of his friends, carefully concealed behind a web of lies and deceit, what gall must he have to think anyone out there would be interested, yet he gets away with it due to the fierce honesty and tenderness of what he writes, seducing readers just as he seduces women.  How can that not be infuriating?  And of course it is, as that’s part of the nature of the beast.  Is this really about Philip, the women in his life, or the art of creating, as they are one and the same, blended together into a stream-of-conscious mix of cinematic imagination, where actors help to provide the clarity the story needs.  Reveling in its intimacy, this film has an unusual appeal and is a joy to watch, where Desplechin seems to have been born to film it, with ideas on how to make it gestating in his mind for over thirty years.