Good intentions

The French blurb says : "Like every year, Fréderic and his wife Fréderique are spending their summer vacation in their big house lost in the Dôme with a good part of their family. One evening they invite Hugo, their new neighbor, for dinner – a man who blithely makes known his homosexuality to everyone. Hugo and Fréderic stay up talking till dawn and sow the seeds of a relationship that will disturb their hearts and those around them."

From the US blurb for the film : "The Enguerands are getting ready to spend another summer in their villa deep in the verdant Provence countryside….Invited by Fréderic to a barbecue, their solitary, self-possessed gay neighbor Hugo (Charles Berling) openly parades his homosexuality. The two men stay up till dawn, exchanging radically different visions of love. As the summer wears on, Fréderique notices a distance opening between her and her husband, and a powerful bond developing between Fréderic and Hugo."

All that is very nice, but it's more a description of what Breitman may have started out to do or what we might expect from the material than what we actually end up with. What might have happened? Would the bond developed that night lead to a deep friendship? To an actual physical relationship -- that might have spoiled things? We'll never know. Instead of having the courage to let the implications of the situation play out in real terms and real time, Breitman's playful artiness, far from daring, is a cop-out.

David Rooney, in Variety, wrote this, the sole comment on the film included in the Rendez-Vous press packet, surprisingly enough, since it is pretty damning : "Actress-turned director Zabou Breitman’s elegant visual compositions and willingness to experiment with style and structure are evident in her second feature, The Man of My Life. but those virtues become vices in a drama that steadily succumbs to self-conscious artiness, drunk on its own sense of contrived poetry and cloudy existential reflection. Exploring the man-crush between a happily married heterosexual and a gay devotee of emotionless physical gratification, the movie is a big tease. Even auds inclined to indulge its pretentiousness will start tuning out as its multiple endings drag on, none of them satisfying or revelatory.”

David Rooney’s assessment is fair. This beautiful film throws away all the sympathy it earns in its early sequences. The summer family atmosphere, Fréderic’s attraction to his wife, the charm of the kids, the disarming directness of Hugo, (as ably played by Charles Berling, clearly a man of keen intellect, confident of his outlook and easy in his skin), the beautiful look of the place – all this is jettisoned when the all-night conversation gets chopped up through the whole rest of the film and intercut with real and fantasy sequences that are confusing and sometimes irrelevant. Breitman says her inspiration was a dream and her note from the dream was “Boy meets boy.” That may have been her intention. (The title, L'homme de sa vie, the man of his life, goes way beyond anything that happens onscreen.) Clearly Breitman is too much in love with her own effects. Her film is so artfully sliced up as to have no progression or clear meaning, and if she meant to show a straight man strongly drawn to a gay one, she botched the effort. Bernard Campan as Fréderic and Berling are fine; if I'd worked on this film I'd feel cheated by the result.

Fréderic goes jogging with Hugo with a twisted ankle and makes it worse. Hugo winds up carrying Fréderic most of the way back. There is some touching and indeed there’s a suggestion that the intense night of conversation may have forged the strongest connection Fréderic has ever felt with another man. But love? Boy meets boy? Not in what emerged from the cutting room. There is also a subplot of Hugo drawn by his daughter to revisit his dying father, who kicked him out of the house twenty years ago. Fréderic was having erection problems with his wife before he met Hugo – at least as the film ended up. There’s exhaustion and confusion, but love or a new sexual orientation? No. Too bad that Breitman wasn't willing to just let the late night conversation – which could have been a bravura bixexual My Dinner with André – play itself out, and then follow normal chronology to show some results of it. Sometimes life as it is, so to speak, is far more fascinating than any dreams or any artistically scrambled narratives with discos and tango floors and beautiful naked young men floating in the air or string quartets playing in a field of grass for the benefit of no one but the camera.

Opened in Paris October 11, 2006. To be shown at the Rendesz-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center March 3 and 5, and at the IFC Center March 4, 2007. US distributor Strand Releasing.

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