Little White Lies
I wonder how a film sets out to retain its viewers’ interest for two-and-a-half hours?
Things to have locked in: a story that starts somewhere interesting and goes somewhere else interesting; pictures that are nicely shot, edited and arranged; good music, and - most important of all - characters in whom the audience is prepared to invest some energy.
The long French drama-comedy Little White Lies, written and directed by Guillaume Canet, has the story and the pictures and a lovely soundtrack, but I just didn’t care enough about the characters.
The film concerns a group of successful 30-something Parisians who holiday together every year in the south of France. One of their number, party boy Ludo, has an accident, so his friends shorten their holiday from two months to two weeks.
Hosting the holiday as usual are self-made man Max (Francois Cluzet) and his long-suffering wife Veronique (Valerie Bonneton). Bombastic, smug, self-indulgent and thoroughly unlikeable, Max is thrown off balance early in the film when his osteopath Vincent (Benoit Magimel) tells him he is falling in love with him.
The struggling Vincent and his unhappy wife Isabelle (Pascale Arbillot) are part of the holiday crew, so there is plenty of unnamed tension as the holiday begins. Vincent and Isabelle have their son along with them, and Max and Veronique bring their family and an au pair. The hedonistic holiday-making crew of “beautiful people” is completed by Marie (Marion Cotillard) and boyfriend Raphael (Mathieu Chedid), Eric (Gilles Lelouche) and girlfriend Lea, Antoine (Laurent Lafitte) and girlfriend Juliette.
If the girlfriends are scantly treated in this review, that mirrors exactly their treatment in the film. How the utterly self-obsessed Eric and the infuriatingly infantile Antoine ever attracted the seemingly nice-enough Lea and Juliette beats me. When Eric gets what he deserves - dumped - he resorts to some histrionic plate-smashing and shouting. In the midst of this he says indignantly, “She told me that I’m a selfish prick.” From my seat in the Village Theatre the other day, I wanted to shout back, “You are a selfish prick!”
The absence of their friend Ludo is contrived to bring unspoken secrets to the surface of the superficially idyllic holiday. In the end, though, the connection between Ludo and the others is not established and the holidaymakers themselves are insufficiently developed to make either the friendship or the secrets interesting. The crucial link between Ludo and all the other characters is established by nothing more solid than shared video coverage of his cross-dressing lip synch performance and some highly melodramatic speeches at a significant later event.
Little White Lies inhabits challenging territory in that it is a relationship drama with comic undertones. I enjoy being exposed to another culture’s sense of humour and I laughed at times, especially when a new-age local was coaching Max in how to breathe while jogging. But, even in 135 minutes of high production-value film, the relationships never grabbed me. The men were too self-indulgent and the women were too neglected - both by their men and by the script - to draw me in. It would be an interesting exercise to see just how much tightening could be brought about by some more rigorous editing.
What did I like? The way some conversations took place behind the music or on the other side of a glass door, the soundtrack, Raphael’s singing, and the performance of Joel Dupuch as the oyster-farmer Jean-Louis who finally gives the friends their pedigrees.
Neil Wilson
