A film of two halves, first from the perspective of the father and then from the mother.
A bittersweet tale of responsibility and the consequences of obsession, this portrait of film producer Gregoire, up to his ears in debt and juggling a succession of ‘difficult’ projects, is heart-felt and bracingly adult.
While the first half of the film focuses on Gregoire’s struggle to stay afloat professionally and personally, the second half shifts the emphasis to his wife Sylvia and their children as they are forced to deal with the fall-out of Gregoire’s obsessive commitment to cinema.
Drawing heavily on real-life producer Humbert Balsan (who produced among others Youssef Chahine, Claire Denis and Bela Tarr) this deceptively lightly handled film carries a real emotional wallop as it unfolds. If Gregoire initially seems like the hero of the piece with his cineaste bombast and likeable élan, it is Sylvia who provides the moral compass and strength of the family.
It’s hard to imagine this kind of film being made successfully (economically or artistically) in the UK – and it remains a real pleasure of French cinema to see this kind of grown-up, complex examination of the inter-dependencies of family life on our screens. This is a film about ordinary people doing their best to make themselves and those they love as happy as real life permits. A real treat.
