A film à clef concerned with the suicide of a risk-taking French film producer modelled on Humbert Balsan. We are thrust straightaway into the flow of life, eavesdroppers, voyeurs on a harried shaggy-haired wheeler and dealer (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) juggling two mobile phones on the sidewalk and in the car, one for family, one for business (“No stars, we shoot in Tajikistan”), seemingly maintaining equanimity even when arrested for speeding on his way home, riding out the ceaseless waves of an overbudget film in Sweden whose director is either a “great artist” or a “psychopath,” a visiting film crew of South Koreans, a promised family vacation to Ravenna, and a mob of clamoring creditors. It is a film of equal halves, the first half focussed exclusively on the producer, and the second, less focussed half, after he has taken what we refer to as the easy way out, split evenly between his widow (Chiara Caselli, a strangely aging but still girlish face) and the eldest of three daughters (Alice de Lencquesaing, the lead actor’s daughter in real life, one would presume). The backdrop of the cinémonde gives it automatically a certain cachet, but apart from a couple of visits to the screening room and to the set in Sweden it could just as well have to do with an investment firm or a construction outfit: the crisis is financial, not artistic, and not inherently very involving, very tangible, very graspable. The film never looks less than impeccable, however, with its crisp, cool, pale color and cozy yet discreet camerawork. Fabled French taste seeps into every particular of the treatment, understated, unstressed, fluid, just a tad tepid. Written and directed by Mia Hansen-Love. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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