I recently saw this at the 2007 Palm Springs International Film Festival and it's a good film with some very good acting from Jean Pierre Darroussin and Valérie Stroh in the principal roles. Veteran French actor Darroussin makes his film debut as a director here with his screenplay adaptation of the Emmanuel Bove novel and casts himself in the role of Charles Benestau, a wealthy lawyer who after a divorce gives up his life of luxury to live as a kind of hermit in a tenement. He runs his law practice from his apartment through word of mouth clientèle only since he has given up owning a phone. One of his clients is an alcoholic wife abuser who lives in the tenement and sends his wife into a coma after a brutal beating. She goes to the hospital and he is off to jail so Benestau takes their teenage daughter to live with him until the mother can recover and return home. Benestau's family has ostracized him for dropping out of society and living like a poor commoner and more problems arise between he and the housekeeper who has agreed to help him look after the girl. It's small film with Darroussin in a fine performance as kind, giving man who always tries to do the noble and right thing but health issues has made him a fatalist. It's a good film and I would give it a 7.0 out of 10.
2 Reviews
I KNEW It Would Be Good
writers_reign24 October 2006
Warning: Spoilers
Jean-Pierre Darroussin has enhanced - and in some cases stolen - some seventy odd movies in the last 30 years, quietly racking up excellent character studies and when offered the chance to 'carry' a major movie - Feux Rouges - he was more than up to the task and succeeded brilliantly. Now he has directed his first full length feature (following and Award Winning Short some years ago) and like another illustrious actor, Gerard Jugnot, he has also written (or co-written) it and plays the leading role. To say he pulls off all three roles wonderfully is to understate. This is a small masterpiece and it was both a pleasure and a privilege to shake his hand at the screening which he attended (and which, in their wisdom, both the BFI and Cine Lumiere had omitted to mention in their respective Brochures). Darroussin has saddled himself with one of the trickiest characters an actor can play, a 'decent' man, the kind perhaps embodied by Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird and by coincidence both characters are lawyers, but whilst Peck - who was, it must be repeated, absolutely brilliant - had a high-profile court case to showcase his innate decency Darroussin has much less to work with playing out his life in an unfashionable area of Paris and performing good deeds which are deliberately misinterpreted so that he winds up almost as a neighborhood Monsieur Hire thanks largely to the poisonous tongue of his fellow screenwriter Valerie Stroh who brands him a pervert. The character, recently divorced, has chosen to virtually cut himself off from his family who are suitably and snobbishly horrified at his new apartment, and dispense more or less free legal advice and even lend money to deadbeat clients, one of whom proceeds to beat up his wife who winds up in hospital and with himself in the slammer it falls upon Darroussin to house the teenage daughter of the marriage. He does all this with no reservations, acting almost trance-like, never doubting that he is doing the 'right' and/or 'christian' thing for which, of course, he must be punished. Darroussin is in almost every scene and displays remarkable assurance and control, contriving to bring glowing oils to what is essentially a water colour pastel. It is to be hoped that the writing-acting-directing team of Darroussin and Stroh continue in this vein with as much success as Jaoui and Bacri with whom, on this showing, they must now be favourably compared.
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