M. Honore last troubled us with the high sexual camp of Ma Mere, an adaptation of the Georges Bataille novella that was faithful to the incest-a-rama of the text, but awful to sit through as a film. Thankfully, we’ve been spared the increasingly sick antics of Mme. Huppert in Dans Paris, though it’s only slightly less irritating than its predecessor.
Romain Duris, now apparently contracted to appear in every French movie, essays a miserable sod who moves back into his dad’s grimy Parisian apartment after the painful dissolution of a romantic relationship. Louis Garrel, playing his brother, is a foppish charmer whose womanising compensates for a painful incident in his past.
They sit around. They talk. They feel pain. Though the film does sporadically achieve a kind of emotional honesty, mostly you want to give everyone a good shake and tell them to get on with it. Worse, the film is plagued with allusions to the nouvelle vague – title sequences are rendered in stark monochrome, characters directly address the camera, shot-reverse-shot conventions are, yawn, inverted.
It’s well performed by the two leading chaps but it’s neither big nor clever.