L’homme qui voulait vivre sa vie
Eric Lartigau (2010)
Roman Duris is a very good actor with unusually strong audience rapport. The longer The Big Picture goes on, the more the film turns into a test of these qualities. Duris plays Paul Exben. Married with two young children, Paul always liked the idea of being a professional photographer but he’s taken the financially safer option of a legal career and is now a partner in a successful Paris law firm. His much older colleague Anne reveals to him that she’s terminally ill and offers Paul sole ownership of the practice. He’s more concerned with events closer to home, increasingly suspicious that his wife Sarah is having an affair with a man they both know called Grégoire Kremer – who is a professional photographer, although not a greatly successful one. When his suspicions are realised, Paul confronts Greg at the latter’s home, and, in the heat of the moment, lashes out and unintentionally kills his rival.
Sarah had already decided she wanted a divorce and taken the children to her sister’s. Paul now takes advantage of his solitude to hide Greg’s body in the deep freeze and assume the dead man’s identity. He then drives to his boat in Brittany, throws Greg’s corpse overboard, and eventually fetches up in Montenegro. There he meets an expatriate Frenchman called Bartholomé, who edits a local newspaper and, while staying overnight with Paul, sees his camerawork. The paper’s picture editor Ivana offers Paul a job: he soon becomes such a successful photographer – with a gallery exhibition and the prospect/threat of international exposure – that he has to abandon the identity of Greg Kremer too. The film ends suddenly at the moment he’s succeeded in doing so. Paul disappears from view, into a new anonymity.
I don’t know if Douglas Kennedy’s 1997 novel The Big Picture is written as a first or third person narrative but Romain Duris is in nearly every frame of the film. In some respects, Eric Lartigau and Laurent de Bartillat, who did the screenplay, are admirably disciplined. They don’t rely on a voiceover telling us what was going on in Paul’s mind and he never confides in anyone. Although this puts colossal pressure on Duris, he demonstrates to an even greater extent than before that he can carry a picture. He suggests a super-speedy metabolism and not just because he’s skinny: in the early scenes we see how fast Paul’s motor runs – and how he’s both great with his kids and childish himself, as well as smart, annoying and charming. Over the course of the film, Paul retains, because he has to, his speed of thought and movement and decision-making – yet he still becomes subdued. Duris is most impressive in how he conveys a man in hiding – not just from the law but from himself, guilty about the crime he’s committed and remorseful about leaving his kids.
It’s refreshing that someone in Paul’s situation doesn’t (and this in spite of the film’s French title) succeed in ‘finding’ himself: he succeeds rather in burying himself more deeply. Duris’s shaggy, swarthy looks also make him believable as a stateless person, a refugee. Even so, there’s only so much even the best actors can do when they’re limited to describing a character’s behaviour, as Duris is here. Of course we can see what Paul is thinking too – when, for example, he’s negotiating terms for the exhibition with the gallery owner. But the thoughts and feelings of his to which we’re privy, while the other people on screen are not, don’t do much more than illustrate, repeatedly, Paul’s predicament.
It makes good pragmatic and psychological sense for Paul to become Greg. There’s a dead man’s passport (and laptop) going spare and Paul knows the legal ropes. His life is now in effect defined by Greg so why not as Greg too? But there’s a problem with the film-makers’ decision to set this adaptation of Kennedy’s novel, published when the internet was still young, in the present day – especially since Paul, as we see in the opening part of The Big Picture, takes pride in the latest electronic toys that he can afford. After he’s defected to Eastern Europe, he does an improbably sketchy Google search for ‘Grégoire Kremer’: he doesn’t, for example, explore elaborations like ‘Grégoire Kremer missing’ (even though we assume Paul’s in Montenegro for much longer than the two- to three-month trip abroad which Paul indicates that Greg’s on, in an e-mail that he sends to Sarah from Greg’s laptop). As Hannah McGill points out in Sight & Sound, it’s incredible there are no online images of the real Greg which would explode Paul’s identity as soon as Bartholomé looks Greg up on the internet. There was another bit I didn’t understand. When Paul, about to make his escape from Paris, tells Anne he won’t accept her offer of taking over the law firm, she says goodbye and good luck – is she expecting to die that night? (Paul doesn’t tell her he’s leaving town.)
Paul’s wife is played by Eric Lartigau’s wife, Marina Fois, who makes it clear from the start that Sarah has other things on her mind. She summons Paul to a lunchtime meeting and he fears she’s going to say she’s seeing another man (this is before he suspects who that might be). When Sarah announces in this scene ‘It’s over’, she’s referring, however, her attempts at a writing career, which she claims Paul has thwarted by turning her into a housewife. The lovely but stony-faced Marina Fois exudes selfish resentment and it’s believable that this is why the marriage is in trouble – it’s less convincing that Sarah’s in love with the vacuously handsome Greg (Eric Ruf). Duris gets better support from Catherine Deneuve as the doomed legal partner (businesslike in the face of death but you see the tiny flickerings of fear too); Branca Katic as Ivana (you believe the mutual attraction here – not least because the humorous Katic’s hair and eyes, though not the expression in them, recall Marina Fois); and, especially, Niels Arestrup (Duris’s father in The Beat That My Heart Skipped) as the droll, hard-drinking Bartholomé. In the smaller parts, I really liked Stevan Radusinovic as the enthusiastically nerdy owner of a camera shop in Montenegro. Paul’s older child is played by the easily expressive Enzo Caçote. (The younger one, not yet even a toddler, is Luka Antic and, according to IMDB, several doubles!) The unobtrusively excellent editing is by Juliette Welfling.
22 July 2011
