Janus Contemporaries: The Innocent

[domino harvey]

Part crime thriller, part romantic comedy, Louis Garrel’s The Innocent shows the dangerous and outlandish lengths two men go to for the women they love. Garrel stars as Abel, an aquarium educator whose mother, Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg), marries one of her drama pupils in the local penitentiary, Michel (Roschdy Zem). Once on parole, Michel attempts to start a legitimate life but soon reverts to his old ways, eventually roping Abel into one of his schemes. Complicating matters is Clémence (Noémie Merlant), Abel’s brazen coworker, who convinces him to take part in the heist. Directing from a screenplay he cowrote (with Tanguy Viel and Naïla Guiguet), Garrel explores the comedic results of playacting’s intrusion into reality, as well as reality’s comedic tendency to transform us into what we never thought we could be.

Extras:
- Meet the Filmmakers, a new interview with director Louis Garrel
- Trailer

[domino harvey]

I enjoyed Garrel’s Woody Allen imitation L’Homme fidele but L’innocent was a big letdown for me, as this is just a bad Pierre Salvadori imitation. The film is more or less doomed from conception because there are only two possible outcomes for the set up of Garrel being convinced that Zem is still engaging in criminal enterprises and neither are particularly interesting (and the ad copy goes ahead and spoils even that). It is apparent to me that Garrel assembled a great cast and just stopped there without giving them anything to do that ever surprises or delights or works within the flimsy story mechanics. Merlant won the Cesar for her work here, but her role is so one note and phoned in that it’s likely this was a reward for being in much better movies that aren’t this. I didn’t believe in these characters, I didn’t care about the small stakes presented, and the film had no compelling reason to exist… and yet I hope a lot of suckers buy this because I want this label offshoot to release more contemporary French films. So, highly recommended?

[tenia]

Same here. It felt like the movie kept going nowhere (but I won't recommend it).

[therewillbeblus]

domino nailed my take on this - a total nosedived attempt at screwbally genre aping. It's a shame Criterion didn't start the Janus Contemporaries line a few years back, as this is basically the common-failure version of what En liberté! actually manages to pull off (but is still resigned to a DVD release from KL...)

I know people here like this film, so I'm definitely interested in hearing something positive to help color my perspective. There's a lot about this I wanted to like (so many ripe ingredients) but I just didn't. And like domino, I'm not immune to Garrel's charms - he knows how to use his zippy economy well, he just doesn't seem to always know how to control it

[ballmouse]

I agree with everything said so far. Though if we want to focus on the positives, then I found the characters and the general direction of the story, minus the unsatisfactory ending, quite satisfactory. It wasn't perfect, but it did engage me in that it didn't read like a prescribed story where characters find themselves in scenes. In so many contemporary films, I find the screenwriter driving the film. In this, I at least felt the characters moving the story along. Ok - so maybe that isn't a high bar, or at least it shouldn't be. But for someone who rarely can finish contemporary films for a multitude of reasons, I at least sat through both Janus Contemporary releases I watched (The Eight Mountains being the other which too happens to have an unsatisfactory ending, at least for me).