Mathieu Amalric, Karin Viard, Gilles Lellouche and Marine Vacth in “Belles Familles”

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.

A love story develops with many detours between Marine Vacth and Mathieu Amalric

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.

Jean Paul Rappeneau is a subtle story teller and this is his ninth movie

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.

The two brothers who are so different! Mathieu Amalric and Guillaume de Tonquédec