This film is a true family business in many ways, since director Jean Paul Rappeneau has directed the film with two of his sons. Julien as co-script writer and Martin as music composer. And the film, a classical French family story with notaries, inheritance, a lost house, and a second “wife” with a beautiful daughter, is a real success !
Elegance, refinement and subtlety are the three adjectives that caracterise this movie on the French bourgeoisie and the importance of houses in one‘s lives. All the actors are tremendous with a special mention for Karin Viard who has never been so sexy and Marine Vacth, her incredibly beautiful daughter, whom we had already noticed in « Jeune et Jolie », by François Ozon in 2013… Mathieu Amalric is fabulous in his part of the successful son-who-made-it-in-Shanghai and returns to save his mother from ruin, and his best friend Gilles Lellouche is vulgar and fun enough to swing the movie around.
Many intellectual snobs will say that the film is not trendy nor fashionable, but that is exactly what I loved about it : the classical signature of director Jean-Paul Rappeneau, the realism of situations with the jealous brother who failed in life, an abandoned wife who is not even jealous any more… It all ends well with a fabulous Chinese pianist conquering our heart with music.
This is not « La Vie de château » anymore nor « le Sauvage » , two of Rappeneau’s most famous films but it is a story that we have all lived through at some point in our lives, and which remains on our mind many days after seeing the film. A true French success.
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One Comment on “Beautiful Families….”
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