An intrigue that Claude Lelouch would not deny, a credits with freeze frame worthy of a Georges Lautner of the 1980s, “For the pleasure” of Herbert Léonard at the bottom of the balloons… But what happened to Louis Garrel? The former dark young leader of Parisian authorism had turned into a tasty comic actor thanks to Maïwenn (“My King”), then a talented director (“Les Deux Amis”, “The Faithful Man”) post-New Wave but not only. Here he is embracing mainstream comedy. As in all the films he directs, Garrel plays an anxious man named Abel. Which takes a dim view of her mother’s new husband, Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg), an ex-actress who teaches theater in prison.
Cow tenderness
The chosen one is called Michel (Roschdy Zem), comes out of ten years in jail for robbery and opens with his sweetheart a flower shop in Old Lyon. Word of honor, he has settled down. Of which Abel, chronically freaked out since the accidental death of his wife, is not convinced. So, flanked by his best friend, the whimsical Clémence (Noémie Merlant), Abel leads Michel. Let’s go over the autobiographical starting point – Garrel’s mother, Brigitte Sy, was a theater teacher in prison and married an inmate, who has since died. It undoubtedly nourished Garrel’s relationship to the subject and the mother-son dialogue, where the fabricated hysteria of their first scene gives way to a particularly gratifying cowardly tenderness – “If you weren’t my son, I’d take you for a jerk”replies Sylvie to Abel who reproaches her for “not doing things bourgeoisly”.
But the success of “The Innocent” is elsewhere, in his shared desire for cinema which takes him away from this personal anchoring and sees Garrel playing with the artifices of fiction. When does comedy, fakery, seduction stop? Questions that innervate Garrel’s four films and that he draws here towards pure entertainment. By plunging his characters into a criminal masquerade that will free them from their neuroses and lies, he offers himself and his three partners a playground full of surprises, where everyone snorts with communicative enthusiasm and not bad of self-mockery.
Tuesday May 9 at 9 p.m. on Canal+. French comedy by Louis Garrel (2022). With Louis Garrel, Roschdy Zem, Noémie Merlant, Anouk Grinberg. 1h40. (Multicast and On Demand).
