Jamie passion and passionfruit!

A much praised French film that I found rather slow and less than gripping.  Nicholas and Marie come back to visit friends in Paris.  They are in the middle of a break up after fifteen years and the film takes us through this process; the awkward sharing of the hotel room, what to say to friends, the meetings with new people, the doubts, the blame, the silences.  It is a very realistic film in the sense of giving us an accurate portrayal of what happens at these times when life seems sucked out of you, but as a piece of cinema it seems to drift along in a sort of improvisation that ends up sapping our interest.  By the finale I couldn’t really care less about the main characters. Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi is very good again but her Marie is rather wet and Bruno Todeschini is literally in the shadows most of the way.  Interesting camerawork which could alienate some but which effectively conveys the divide.

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