Guillaume Brac’s first feature is a small, exact, funny film about a failed musician wintering with his father, and then it becomes a different film about the same man. The first is better than the second, and Vincent Macaigne holds both together.
Guillaume Brac’s first full-length film, written with Hélène Ruault, sends a man home. Maxime is a rock musician in his thirties who had a record people liked and has not had another, and he retreats to Tonnerre, the small Burgundy town he grew up in, to sleep in his father’s spare room and write songs nobody is waiting for. The title is the name of the town and also the French for thunder, and for most of its 106 minutes the film is far more the first than the second. That is the film’s plan, and it is also where the trouble lies.
The first hour is close to lovely. Vincent Macaigne plays Maxime as a large, soft, embarrassed man, forever apologising for taking up room, and he is funny without once asking to be. Bernard Ménez, as the father, is his opposite: quick, needling, delighted by his own jokes, the sort of man who cheats at cards for the pleasure of being caught. Their scenes together in the kitchen, in which neither says the thing that matters and both know it, are the best writing in the film. Brac fills the town with real people rather than actors, winegrowers at a counter, a man selling Christmas trees, a dance teacher, and they give the place a weight no set could.
Tom Harari shoots all of this in the flat grey light of a Burgundy December, no sun, snow on the fields, breath visible in every exterior. The house Héléna Cisterne dresses for the father is cluttered with a dead wife’s furniture and a living man’s mess, and it tells us more about the family than the dialogue does. Rover and Julien Roig supply the music, and the songs Maxime plays are good enough to make his failure plausible, which is a harder trick than it sounds.
Solène Rigot’s Mélodie is the film’s puzzle, by design. She is cool where he is warm, guarded where he is helpless, and Rigot plays her so that we never know whether she is bored, frightened or simply young. The romance, when it comes, is filmed with care: a walk by the river, a first night handled in a couple of shots, a morning after in which Maxime cannot stop grinning and she is already looking at the door. We liked them together and we did not believe in them for a second, and we think that is exactly what Brac wanted.
The second half takes a turn we will not describe. What we can say is that the light comedy of the first hour is not a misdirection; it is the point, because the man we have been laughing at has been drowning the whole time and the film has let us enjoy ourselves rather than tell us. We were disarmed by a card game and laughing at Ménez, and then a scene of Maxime sitting in his car outside somebody’s house in the dark made us properly uncomfortable, and we realised the film had stopped being funny some time before we noticed. That is a real achievement and Brac should be proud of it.
What follows is less sure of itself. Once the film has changed its register it does not seem to know how long to stay there, and Damien Maestraggi’s editing, unhurried and precise in the first half, starts to skip. Scenes that need a minute get thirty seconds. Jonas Bloquet’s Ivan is asked to carry more than the script has given him. The final stretch resolves matters quickly, as if Brac had lost his nerve about how dark he was prepared to go, and a film that had spent an hour refusing to hurry suddenly hurries.
The reviews so far have split, with one calling it thin and the rest calling it promising, and we sit nearer the second camp. There is a long tradition in French cinema of the man who talks too much to a woman who says too little, and Brac knows it and works inside it honestly. Where he goes further than most is in taking the man’s wanting seriously as something that could hurt somebody, and he gets most of the way there.
See it for Macaigne, who is one of the most watchable sad men in European cinema, and for Ménez, who steals every scene he is in and then hands it back. Watch it on a cold night, since the film will not warm you up. And do not let the first hour persuade you that you know what kind of film you are in.
