Les Regrets

I had been secretly looking forward to this film for a while: I'd enjoyed Yvan Attal in 'Ma femme est une actrice' and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi in '5x2' and I don't mind a decent romantic drama from time to time. So I ended up going to see it with a friend last night, the opening night.

In French there is the perfect word to describe this film - 'bof'. It's an expression of indifference - a bit like saying 'whatever', but not quite.

So the gist is Mathieu (Attal) spots Maya (Bruni-T) from across the street one day. Evidently they know each other. She sees him, doesn't speak to him but ends up inviting him over for a glass of wine. And so, predictably, despite them both being married, begins their affair.

But at every critical turn of the relationship, we have a nice cliched 'volte-face'('about face') where the character leaves the other one and you think it's all over, then halfway down the road they turn around and go back for a passionate clinch.

Lots of sex, as you'd expect from the director of L'Ennui which I saw a while back.

One of the most interesting things about this film was the way it dealt with modern communication - namely, text messages. There was some very classic and European about this film - by which I'm referring to the way that such films are often hard to date, as if they are removed from a time frame. Yet so often contemporary films fail to acknowledge the role of modern communication in our lives: pretty much everyone texts, and emails, and yet we rarely see it on screen. Texts particularly can be so instrumental in the development of a liaison or reltaionship, and yet we just seem to be ignoring them! Maybe LCD screens just aren't sexy enough?

Anyway in this film I was pleasantly startled to see that when the recipient was reading his/her text, we heard a voiceover from the sender. It was a really small thing, but it really stood out, and I liked it. Indeed we did view a screen from time to time, but the voiceover helps to mix it up.

It's very European-naturalistic - very little make-up, lots of tortured faces - both the lead actors look about 10 years older than in the films I mentioned in the first paragraph. But even the direction continues the naturalism with lots of those scenes that are redundant narratively, but help to set the scene. We also avoid confrontation scenes, like the one between Mathieu and his wife which we feel we are building up to. But i like that. Not giving us exactly what we want and expect.

There's nothing remarlable in the plot. I think the title pretty much give it all away. It was an entertaining little ride, but I'm not going to be shouting about it from the rooftops. Perhaps it's for the best that it doesn't look like it's going to make it to anglophone shores any time soon.