The Innocent

Nominated for eleven Césars, Louis Garrel's romantic comedy is actually a mixed bag.

My rating here is inevitably something of a compromise due to the fact that Louis Garrel's film is one that divides into two halves, the first surprisingly adroit and successful and the second a let-down. That is a fate that overtakes a number of films, but it is surprising to find it happening in this instance because in theory it is the first half that should be the harder to bring off.

The Innocent tells the story of a young widower, Abel Lefranc, a role played by Garrel himself, who is disturbed when his mother Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg) takes up with a robber, Michel Ferrand (Roschdy Zem), whom she has met when teaching drama in a prison. Michel is now ending five years in jail and on his release he and Sylvie promptly get married. He claims to be a reformed character but Abel does not trust him which is all the more understandable since it would seem that this is not the first time that Sylvie has fallen for such a man with disastrous consequences. Abel discusses his fears with Clémence (Noémie Merlant) who had been close to his late wife and is now his best friend. Before long it emerges that in helping Sylvie to finance the setting up of a flower shop Michel has used money linked to his criminal background and is indebted enough in consequence to have to accept a role in a one-off heist involving the theft of barrels of caviar from a truck.

This film is the fourth to be directed by Garrel and in each case he has also acted in it and shared the writing credit. Of these works the only one to be released in the UK until now was 2018’s engaging A Faithful Man which skirted melodrama and which Garrel himself chose to describe as a comedy of manners. The mix of potentially conflicting styles is again a central feature of The Innocent. The central situation could be the basis for a straightforward drama and the film contains touches that seem to belong to that world. Thus there is the fact that Abel is a young widower because his wife has died in a car accident and it would appear that he was the driver. But such details are not dwelt on and Garrel’s film consciously adopts a light tone. A notable example of this is found in several scenes in which the suspicious Abel trails Michel in his car in order to discover what he is up to. These scenes echo Hitchcock's Vertigo but are handled in a way that is never heavy. Instead, they contain a sense of the comic that can extend into outright comedy. It's a tricky balance to get right, but Garrel pulls it off assisted by several key factors: the engaging performances of all the main players, the speed at which the narrative develops and the presence of a number of additional elements that please (the Lyon locations, the excellent editing by Pierre Deschamps, the fine photography of Julien Poupard and the music score by Grégoire Metzel which is most helpful in establishing the mood of individual scenes).

The film’s lightness of touch is reminiscent of past eras of cinema and that is further confirmed by the inclusion of fades to black, occasional split screen images and even the iris shot. But then, just when one feels that The Innocent is securely balanced on its own terms, two things happen. Firstly, there is a scene which abruptly and without warning marks a major plot development and which misleadingly echoes the very start of the movie in which what we have seen had proved to be a scene of people acting. Secondly, the film now moves on to deal with the heist itself and at this stage the comedy so central to its tone seems to fade away. It is, of course, always possible for a film to darken as it goes along but, if The Innocent increasingly asks us to take it relatively seriously, the actual plotting loses all conviction and scenes with the truck driver in a café come across as downright silly. The final scene of all offers an echo of the first half of the film and one that comes close to recovering the earlier tone. At least half of this film provides the kind of appealing lightweight entertainment that we can well do with these days and does so with a character of its own. Consequently, at one stage it had seemed likely that this would be a four-star review. Sadly, the rest of the film undermines what it achieved earlier, but there may be viewers more readily able to adjust to what the second half has to offer than I was.

Original title: L’innocent.

MANSEL STIMPSON

Cast: Roschdy Zem, Louis Garrel, Anouk Grinberg, Noémie Merlant, Jean-Claude Pautot, Zeyaelddin Seyed Saleh, Jean-Claude Bolle-Reddat, Yanisse Kebbab, Léa Wiazemsky, Olga Amelchenko, Florent Masarin.

Dir Louis Garrel, Pro Anne-Dominique Toussaint, Screenplay Tanguy Viel, Louis Garrel and Naïla Guiguet, Ph Julien Poupard, Pro Des Jean Rabasse, Ed Pierre Deschamps, Music Grégoire Metzel, Costumes Corinne Bruand.

Les Films de Tournelles/Arte France Cinéma/Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Cinéma/Canal+/Ciné+-metfilm distribution.
99 mins. France. 2022. US Rel: 17 March 2023. UK Rel: 25 August 2023. Cert. 15.