JEAN-PIERRE DARROUSSIN AND ANASTASIOS SOULIS IN RENDEZVOUS IN KIRUNA

A long journey northward into new emotional territory

Jean-Pierre Darroussin is one of French cinema's iconic soulful grumpy guys. Le Monde's review of this film calls him "a faux grinch." He's also a mainstay of Robert Guédiguian's rich and prolific filmography. Darroussin is the protagonist here, and a perfect one. Super-successful workaholic architect Ernest Toussant, he doesn't want to go to Lapland, of all places, to identify a biological son he has never met who has died in a boating accident. He's busy: the film shows a whole huge roomful of people he directs in his architecture business and he has some big projects afoot, including a competition he's eager to win. Nonetheless he heads off, with no explanation to his staff or his girlfriend Victoire (Judith Henry). On a ferry heading north he runs into a young man, a Swede named Magnus (Anastasios Soulis), conveniently a French speaker from two now abandoned years studying archaeology in Lille, presently on his way to visit his grandfather. He's obviously a temporary stand-in for the lost son Ernest never knew, but in this bittersweet, understated film such things are never pushed. It later emerges that he left behind his first love in France.

They ride together in Ernest's posh BMW, then are separated, then by chance reunited, upon which the plot adds a touch of danger because Magnus has tangled with a biker, and attacked his Harley in revenge, and Ernest has inadvertently knocked the bikes of this man and his buddy over. Now coincidentally the Swedish man who was the dead youth's de facto foster father is a police inspector who starts hunting for Ernest, knowing who he is, intending to arrest him for a hit-and-run. An emotional highlight is Magnus' visit to his grandfather in Kiruna, accompanied by Ernest. Darroussin is great here, showing infinite sympathy while listening to Swedish he doesn't understand a word of. The grandfather tells Magnus not to stay with him this summer because he is too depressed by the death of his wife. A very Nordic moment.

Somehow this action is both sparse and over-complicated, the plotting on the far-fetched side as well. The director, who has a Swedish mother and a French father, seems to favor films where Europeans take long journeys into the Nordic lands. Some of this one seems to play with symbols more than "realities." But things pick up considerably in the last half hour, when Ernest identifies Antoine, his handsome, drowned, unseen son and also meets up with Stig (Claes Ljungmark), the retired police inspector who protected the dead son and his mother long ago. Ernest, a successful man, a cold man, is now comforted by visiting the sadness of his past action. For him clearly regret is better than emptiness. Saying goodbye to Magnus once again Ernest heads down the road in his BMW back to his architectural projects and Victoire, whom he's kept calling throughout this trip, without much of a sense of closeness. With her too this visit to his son's corpse leads to a raprochement. Perhaps for Novion this story symbolizes a heritage never fully embraced, approachable only by en effort. Jean-Pierre Darroussin conveys the requisite tender melancholy of the story nicely. This is a road movie in which one has plenty of time to think and feel.

Written by Olivier Massart and Anna Novion, with cinematography by Pierre Novion.

Rendez-vous à Kiruna, 97 min., with dialogue in French, Swedish, and English, debuted at Cairo in Nov. 2012 and opened in cinemas in France 30 Jan. 2013 to decent reviews (Allociné press rating: 3.1.) Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco Film Society's Nov. 2013 French Cinema Now series.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.