High-class French suspense film. The "suspense" label is used advisedly, because the suspense, such as it is, never rises much above tepid. Tepid suspense, all the same, is still suspense. Suspense tends to stop being suspense only when overheated beyond the bounds of the human. The reliable gauge of it, always, is our degree of interest in What Happens Next. The very human hero here (the mild-mannered, bland-looking, balding Aurélien Recoing, who could pass for the younger brother of Larry Miller, if you know who that is) is a recently laid-off business executive who, unable to face his wife, father, entire family with the truth, has fabricated instead a tall story of a new job with the United Nations in Geneva. We don't know any of this when we first meet him (asleep all through the opening credits in the reclining passenger seat of his car), but we know it a long time before his wife, father, and the rest of the family know it. We are taken in, as it were, as confidants, even co-conspirators. For a while he is able to stay afloat financially with a phony investment scheme, though he is neither cold-blooded nor crafty enough to bilk anyone but friends and acquaintances. The first person to see through the scheme is an eavesdropping stranger in a hotel lobby, also a smuggler of brand-name knockoffs, who has a proposition of his own. These same general ingredients could readily, on the Hollywood hot plate, have been boiled away to a vapor. They fully retain here their lifelike savor: the universal human need of a place in the world, a position, a purpose. Director Laurent Cantet perhaps draws things out more measuredly and lengthily than necessary, but he maintains a firm control throughout, never loses hold of our interest in What Happens Next. With Karin Viard and Serge Livrozet. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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