One thing the recent French Film Festival has proved is that there’s another successful business plan for the movies apart from the one dominating Hollywood at the moment.
Films like The Innocent hark back to an earlier time, when films came from a few bright ideas and original characters, and didn’t depend on endless remakes, and franchises based on elderly blueprints.
Photo: Screenshot
It also helps if it’s the work of a hot, new auteur – in this case star, writer and director Louis Garrel. He plays Abel, whose mother Sylvie teaches theatre at the local prison.
Abel’s disgusted when Sylvie falls for her leading man, an ex-burglar called Michel and marries him just before his release. Abel ropes in the lovely Clemence to help spy on the shifty Michel.
Should I mention that Abel is a scientist who works at the city aquarium, that he and Clemence are just good friends, though Clemence thinks he needs to get over the death of his wife and have some fun?
Or that Abel’s mother is quitting the theatre game to go into business with Michel, though who knows how Michel’s paid for their new shop?
Because, like so many films in this year’s French Festival, the intricate construction of the plot is much of its appeal. Like an old-fashioned Swiss watch, there are so many independent wheels and levers pushing the story to a satisfying conclusion.
The conservative, risk-averse Abel may be at the centre of the increasingly complicated story, but writer director Garrel surrounds him with more colourful characters.
Passionate theatre star Sylvie, cool ex-crim Michel trying to go straight, and gorgeous loose cannon Clemence - the last person you want to have on board in a tricky caviar robbery.
Despite The Innocent’s apparent French farce origins, it owes just as much to that country’s classic New Wave heist movies of the Fifties and Sixties.
Garrel even looks a bit like Jean-Paul Belmondo in a certain light.
And like a French New Wave film, The Innocent borrows freely from the auteur’s real life. Garrel’s mother not only taught theatre in prisons but she also married one of the inmates.
While it’s safe to say that what happened next came entirely from Garrel’s imagination, it explains the unique flavour of the film – not quite comedy, not quite crime drama, not quite romance.
Garrel’s deadpan demeanour works particularly well opposite Noémie Merlant as Clemence. Surprisingly, her background was almost entirely straight drama before The Innocent - in films like Portrait of a lady on fire and Tár opposite Cate Blanchett.
I say “surprisingly” – she’s hilarious in this.
But as I suggested at the start, it’s so refreshing to see a film constructed the traditional, organic way – first, a script that takes real life in a smart, well-constructed direction, then a cast of unpredictable characters, and finally an ending that ties all the loose ends so deftly you didn’t see it coming.
Mind you, such success is by no means automatic. The fact that The Innocent has done so well at festivals – it also notably won a César for Best Script – indicates that merely being French is no guarantee of cinematic greatness. But it clearly doesn’t hurt.
And it’s always nice to see quality being rewarded now and again.
