The Institut Français Pékin remains one of Beijing's solaces. Last week it gave me the opportunity to see one of last year's most debated French films, L'Homme q'on Aimat Trop.
L'Homme q'on Aimait Trop is the 21st feature film directed by André Téchiné, major post New Wave French director about whose output I had read quite a bit but hadn't actually come round to seeing one of his films till last week.
L'Homme q'on Aimait Trop (lame English title: “In the Name of My Daughter”) fictionalizes a French cause célèbre, the Le Roux affair, concerning the eponymous family, rich casino owners headed by Renèe Le Roux (Catherine Deneuve) target of an hostile takeover bid by purported Italian Mafiosi, finally undone by heiress Agnès Le Roux (Adèle Haenel), who switched sides in a board meeting due to her love for (former and now dejected family lawyer allied with the Mafiosi) Maurice Agnelet (Guillaume Canet) and subsequently disappearing never to be seen again, with suspicions falling heavily upon Maurice, notorious and dramatic court case ensuing.
The point of L'Homme q'on Aimait Trop is not to tell the story, which is widely known in France, (a sudden philosophical urge compels me to speculate that that is the case of all film –to not tell a story, I mean, not to be widely known in France, but I'll digress no further) but to fictionalize and give speculative motivations to the characters´ actions. In The MacMahonian's record, it scores OK, but it's maybe overrated. It lays heavily on Canet to portray Agnelet's unfathomable ambiguity: was he ever sincere in his love for Agnès? Did he actually kill her? This he delivers well, as does the rest of the cast, although as the rest of the cast he tends to err slightly on the side of the histrionic. Téchiné uses (what they say is) his signature dramatic naturalism that works better, one suspects, in viewers who, like me but presumably unlike the majority of the original target audience, didn't know much about the Le Roux affair before seeing the film.
A decent evening's entertainment but nothing to write home about is The MacMahonian's verdict, extensive to the remainder of André Téchiné's output pending further evidence.