Guillaume Canet Archives

In the Name of the Land

3 Stars

M, 103 minutes

Review by © Jane Freebury

French farmers sure know how to stage a media event. In recent times, they have let sheep loose at the Louvre, dumped tonnes of pumpkins and manure at the doors of government buildings. A recent demo saw a battalion of tractors from around the country descend on Paris to protest about falling prices and the EU common agricultural policy.

The French agricultural community seems to be able to make its voice heard, however In the Name of the Land is the story of an individual farmer who kept his worries to himself.

a proud and self-reliant individual who felt driven to battle on alone

It’s the heartfelt story of Pierre Jarjeau (played by the popular Guillaume Canet) a devoted husband and father of two, who loved the land but the farming life got the better of him. Canet, not instantly recognisable in a wig with a bald patch, has rarely been better in the role of a proud and self-reliant individual who felt driven to battle on alone.

In the Name of the Land is written and directed by Edouard Bergeon, the son and grandson of farmers. He quit the land to become a photojournalist, though he has in a sense returned with a feature film that is based on the story of his own father and his travails with the family farm.

In the late 1970s, Pierre had recently returned from several years in the US. Spending his time among cattle ranchers who ran herds of 10,000 head in the wide open, sparsely populated spaces of Wyoming.

Pierre reclaims his sweetheart, Claire (Veerle Baetens), and takes over the family farm, Grands Bois, undertaking to buy it from his father, Jacques (Rufus), a steely-eyed, implacable old autocrat, as hard as his son was gentle and loving. When Pierre was signing on the dotted line committing to the purchase, why was I having a sense of déjà vu?

French rural dramas sometimes speak of quiet desperation and read like Greek tragedy

Ah yes. It took me back to a film in 2011, another devastating portrait of rural life, You Will Be My Son. That film was about a winemaker (Niels Arestrup in the role) who also made his son’s life hell and selected the son of his steward to take over the business.

From time to time, a gothic strain emerges in French rural dramas, like the recent Bloody Milk, that speaks of quiet desperation and reads like Greek tragedy.

With its big country canvas and optimistic opening mood, In the Name of the Land starts out rather like a Western. Whether riding his BMW motorbike or striding through the rich earth of his fields, Pierre seems like a man with a future.

The confidence is offset by a slight but growing sense of dread. Whether it is the risk of injury through careless use of machinery, or the chance that Pierre’s teenage son Thomas (Anthony Bajon) has an accident while tearing through the countryside on his new mountain bike. When disaster does arrive, it seems inevitable from the start.

Despite his innate cockiness, it seems Pierre is in over his head, heavily invested in yet another new scheme to pull him through. Whether it’s goats or chickens, each bold new business plan seems to fall short of the objective.

As Pierre becomes a chain-smoker with blood pressure going through the roof, and impossible for his family to deal with, a palpable sense of impending disaster is taking hold of the narrative.

When Pierre pays his father a visit, a rare event since the old man became a widower, Jacques never thinks to suspend loan repayments or offer support. All he can say is ‘work is the only cure’.

Jacques was farming in the early days of the EU common agricultural policy, when there was less competition, and less regulation. His son was a dedicated and competent farmer like him, but more inclined to be entrepreneurial and accept more risk.

What exactly made for different career outcomes for the two men is never entirely clear. More backstory would have helped this intimate, sad tale.

In the Name of the Land did big business at the French box office last year, but with audiences outside the cities. It suggests that empathy for the rural sector among city folk in France may still have a way to go.

First published in the Canberra Times on 29 November 2020

La Belle Epoque

M, 110 minutes

4 Stars

Review by © Jane Freebury

This delicious tale of lovers a half century apart is a postmodern romance. Part your own romantic adventure in an era of choice, part relationship drama.

Stalwarts of French cinema, actors Fanny Ardant and Daniel Auteuil, feature as a jaded older married couple, in a story intertwined with an affair in crisis between a young couple. As an entrepreneur and one of the actors he casts, Guillaume Canet and Doria Tillier play the latter.

The two veterans, Ardant and Auteuil as Marianne and Victor, are great foils for each other. She is utterly believable as the vibrant, frustrated psychoanalyst wife, while the chameleon Auteuil is spot on, unrecognisable in beard and moustache. A political cartoonist still valiantly wielding pencil and paper in the online world.

The new digital reality is something Victor doesn’t get, or want a part in. As a technophobe who doesn’t even own a cell phone, he is the butt of endless jokes, from the earliest (somewhat off-putting) scenes.

The crisis in their marriage has reached a nadir but it is made-in-heaven for the scenarist of La Belle Epoque, young director Nicolas Bedos. One of the funniest scenes takes place as they drive home in their Tesla. The self-drive vehicle lets them argue face-to-face, while GPS is telling Victor to extinguish his cigarette.

Marianne and Victor are the best of sparring partners. They have many difficulties including her open affair with, of all people, the editor, Francois (Denis Podalydes), who fired Victor from his job as a cartoonist.

At home in bed, Marianne is immersed somewhere inside her 3D goggles when Victor attempts to read his book. Things escalate cruelly for him and he is sent packing.

a meltdown with humour, generosity and wistfulness for what is past

It’s a sharp, witty screenplay from Bedos that plays both sides of the fence. It also steps back for perspective on how times have changed for each of them since they met.

Were things left at that level alone, we may feel we have squirmed in front of films like La Belle Epoque many times before. In the domestic battles that featured long ago in films like Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Ingmar Bergman’s haunting Scenes from a Marriage.

La Belle Epoque does not do that kind of total meltdown. It has humour, generosity and a wistfulness for what is past. This suits Auteuil’s dreamer who, although his satiric instincts are well honed, is not quite tethered to the new realities.

Time travel adds a delicious new dimension to this domestic drama.

Victor is offered a trip to an era of his choosing. It comes as a present from Antoine (Canet), who has been a friend of their son since childhood. He runs a business, Time Travelling Inc, that offers ‘tailor-made historical events’, professionally scripted and staged, for customers to take part in, travelling to a ‘belle epoque’ of their choice.

it flips back and forth between reality, artifice and the grey areas in between in a directorial tour de force

The tailor-made events could involve attending a party with William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway or playing the doomed French queen Marie Antoinette. Or might simply offer someone an evening of conversation with a parent who has passed away.

Antoine, a scenarist and director, has a sharp eye for actors that haven’t got themselves into character. He also has a sharp eye for anachronisms, which ensures that the immersive, attractively lit mise en scene constructed for these staged events enhances the total film experience for the cinema audience too.

Victor’s choice, as expected, is not wildly imaginative. He chooses the moment when he met Marianne at a bar in Lyon in 1974.

In another cross-current, Margot (Tillier), who Antoine is infatuated with, plays the part of the young Marianne. Antoine plays out his own feelings and manipulates her on screen.

Then Victor himself begins to develop feelings for Margot and tracks her down to the home she shares with a husband and baby. Or does she?

Time travel to the 1970s has some more entertaining possibilities than we see here, more than the boiled egg bar snacks. But the scenes in that decade are a fun and affectionate take on a decade swamped with change.

Keeping this ambitious and clever story together, flipping back and forth between the reality and the artifice and the grey areas in between is a directorial tour de force. Bedos’ next film will be eagerly anticipated.

First published in the Canberra Times on 15 August 2020

*Featured image: With Margot (Doria Tillier) aboard, Victor (Daniel Auteuil) travels back in time

We’ll End Up Together

(aka Little White Lies 2)

M, 134 minutes

4 Stars

In 2010, Little White Lies was an ensemble piece about a group of friends who decided to go ahead with their reunion even though one of their number had been critically injured in a motorbike accident. The bittersweet comedy about friendship hit the spot, and became a big hit in France and abroad.

We’ll End Up Together is the follow up to that film, picking up the story, not where it left off, but some years later. It is the next instalment of Little White Lies. Partners have changed or left, children have arrived on the scene, aspirations have adjusted and fortunes fluctuated.

a surprise birthday party that is neither nice nor convenient

Max (the very dependable Francois Cluzet), who has a holiday home on Cap Ferret, a spit of land on the French Atlantic coast, is once again the host, only he doesn’t know it this time. His friends arrive to spring a surprise 60^th birthday party on him.

Marie (Marion Cotillard) and Antoine (Laurent Lafitte) join in ‘Who Am I?’

But Max is in the doldrums. His restaurant business has floundered, his marriage is over and he must now sell his holiday home at the trendy resort area. The surprise is neither nice nor inconvenient, because Max is on the point of selling up.

Well that’s too bad, I hear you thinking. And well you might, during the string of social and environmental upheavals that have marked 2020.

Max isn’t the most sympatico of people. More on the dour side. A wet blanket who puts the fire out while his friends are dancing because it’s time for him to go to bed. One wonders how he has actually kept the friends who have showed up. Then again, it has been seven years since they saw him last.

However, it’s not just about Max. It’s about friendship, the kind that lasts.

All of the characters, with the exception of several newcomers, are played by the same actors. Eric (Gilles Lellouche), who has become an established and successful actor, arrives with his baby daughter and a hilariously belligerent nanny, but, crucially, without his wife. She might be dropping MDMA in Ibiza, for all he knows.

And life has caught up with a toughened and disillusioned Marie (Marion Cotillard) who was in a partnership with Ludo (Jean Dujardin) at the time he died. Her son, who she has a tendency to forget about, is seven.

Vincent (Benoit Magimel), who had a big crush on the resolutely hetero Max in the last film, arrives with his new gay partner. His former wife, Isabelle (Pascale Arbillot), has blossomed as a single and is into online dating. She is there too, with their son.

Antoine (Laurent Lafitte) is the only one who apparently hasn’t much changed, and he remains the butt of most of the jokes, involving koalas, caterpillars, and other ephemera. It really is a wonder how different Lafitte is from the sinister and controversial character he once played in Elle opposite Isabelle Huppert.

Cluzet had the lead role in Canet’s murder mystery of 2006, Tell No One. It was the actor-turned-filmmaker’s second feature film and brought his work as director to international attention. His relationship with Marion Cotillard, with whom he has two children, has earned him some attention too.

a big-hearted film about friends, getting on

It is amusing to read that Canet had to convince his fine ensemble cast to make this second film together. They didn’t sign on at first, but sent him back to do a redraft.

The first Little White Lies was compared with The Big Chill, Lawrence Kasdan’s classic American film about friends who also reunite over the death of one of their group. Canet readily admits that he admires it and has referenced it in both of his White Lies films.

He has certainly used some great American pop and rock music on the soundtrack, which I felt intruded on the francophone world. But the warm and affirming We’ll End Up Together engenders a completely different mood to the Kasdan film.

Developing the original Little White Lies was a tough experience for Canet. He wrote it quickly in six weeks, angry that friends had let him down when he landed in hospital with a life-threatening condition.

It’s interesting that We’ll End Up Together, a big-hearted film about friendship, can have begun in such a way.

First published in the Canberra Times on 8 August 2020