COMIC DRAMA; 1hr 30min (French with subtitles)
STARRING: André Dussollier, Sabine Azéma, Thierry Lhermitte, Joséphine De Meaux
Bedroom eyes: Azéma and Dussollier
The dynamic between Annie and her husband of 50 years, François (smooth operators Azéma and Dussollier), is set up quick-smart by writer-director Ivan Calbérac in his comedy with bite. François is a retired general and full-time martinet. His wife is all smiles and serenity. Or then again, maybe not… Humans can be a casebook of contradictions and Annie isn’t entirely the paragon she presents herself as, which François discovers when he stumbles across a cache of her 40-year-old love letters.
The letters are flowery and graphic (“Your glowing breasts… your erupting Venus triangle”), which enrages François no end, although the lust object could hardly be less hot-and-bothered. The way François sees it, 40 years is a blink in the bigger picture, and their decades of matrimony with three grown kids notwithstanding, he refuses to forgive his dark-horse wife. One way or another unpleasant way, her erstwhile lover (Lhermitte as Boris) is going to pay.
As if this vengeance mission isn’t nutty enough, instead of leaving François to his own devices, Annie bossily insists on accompanying him to Nice, where Boris is still living. The two bunk down there with their daughter Capucine (De Meaux). While François feebly attempts to shape up for his deranged encounter, Annie, whose grip on the truth appears to be slippery at best, calmly lies to Capucine by telling her their visit is the latter-day honeymoon that she and François never had — and at this rate, are highly unlikely to ever have.
If this stoush in a demitasse were all that Calbérac wrote, its pay-off would be froth and bubble … but the director isn’t done with secrets yet. Annie and François still have scores to settle, as much with their past and present selves as with each other. That their heavy lifting happens on the honeyed sweep of the Riviera, balancing intensity with tossed-off elegance, is as quintessentially French as the stealth-bomb closer nobody could see coming.
