Today though, is not one of those days, as with LITTLE WHITE LIES, the new offering from 'Tell No One' (2006) director Guillaume Canet, the fruit is more like a moulding banana; a slapstick, slippery joke wrapped around an inedible, mushy mess. For whilst this film is peppered with some good comic moments, some occasionally honest and dramatic scenes and the odd chucklesome set-up that wouldn't seem out of place in 'National Lampoon's Vacation', it is too often bogged down in a very French self-importance, the kind of pseudo-intellectual bourgeois love-in that brings the viewer to sickness, jealousy, pity and mild xenophobia all at once.
The film opens with an abrupt crash, as a highly inebriated man, mysteriously upset by something, leaves a club and whizzes off through an empty Paris on his scooter before colliding with a fast-moving truck. So far so intriguing. Later, at the hospital, we find a horde of handsome, chic, thirty-somethings gathered in the waiting room. These are the closest friends of Ludo (the unlucky scooterist), and are tremendously shaken up by their pal's accident and horrific injuries, yet they come to the odd conclusion, outside the doors, that despite their friend's comatose condition, they will still indulge themselves in the traditional summer trip to the holiday home of successful restaurant owner Max (Francois Cluzet). There's nothing they can do by staying here, they agree, and someone will be on hand to give them a dingle should anything happen to their pal. Then, one thinks, they'll come and rushing back, sand buckets and flip flops a-flying. Well. Phew.
In the time preceding the jaunt and the couple of weeks spent away - a veritable middle-class explosion of glamorous boat trips, wine quaffing, oysters and new age philosophy - the dynamic of the group wibbles and wobbles through sexual, marital, romantic and philosophical revelations, as each character has his or her own chance for redemption and realisation. Ludo's accident takes its toll on some more than others, most of all Marie who, played by Marion Cotillard, is not too busy flippantly sleeping with various partners (of both sex, mind, she's such a free spirit) and basking in her own charitable visits to Africa to shed a tear for the man she used to date and to whom she confesses, over the phone (in a scene that played like The Diving Bell And The Butterfly if re-made by the team who brought us Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus), that she is not very good with men, but that she always loved him the most. Of course she did.
And it goes on, with various subplots - gay confessions, romantic missions to Paris, passing visits by crooning, rugged musicians - thrown together with clumsy, ill-judged nonchalance until the film ends with a frankly baffling succession of vomit-inducing confessions. When the inevitable happens and the friends are forced to realise that they may not have been the best of friends to each other, the director unleashes, through his own writing and unrelentingly gushy direction (the soundtrack is a mixture of pained acoustic warblings by such tear-jerk specialists as Damien Rice and Antony And The Jonsons and 70s free-love anthems) are torrent of sentimentality that makes one reel back in fear of having his or her shoes doused in tears.
Though some viewers, those who seek out the latest postcard sobfest (see 'My Sister's Keeper' or 'Grace Is Gone'), may enjoy the unhinged emotional outpouring, many will find it uncomfortable, unsympathetic and unnecessary. Death and mourning has been handled before, and with far better results, and this film suffers from a clash in tone that sees melodrama and slapstick comedy forced together like square pegs and round holes. One minute someone is maniacally smashing through the walls of his holiday home with an axe in search of unwelcome weasel intruders (those pesky varmits), and the next they are sat with the rest of the herd, cuddled up like the Dawsons Creek gang, watching old holiday movies of their comatose friend.
It's a strange thing to see a director whose talent has previously been clear to see come so strangely unstuck, but Little White Lies is a very unsettling experience indeed. An air of proud gloating seeps from the screen that makes one feel insulted, angry and inevitably quite bored, and one cannot help but feel that Canet, in making this film, is a director who wanted to show an ability for both the amusing and the serious, but who failed to handle the delicate balance between the two. Like a clown climbing from the wreckage of his tiny collapsable car and then delivering the final lines of Shakespeare's Juliet...
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