I watched one French film L’homme qui voulait vivre sa vie (2010), directed by Eric Lartigaux, whose films I had never seen before, he shot before, mostly comedy. This film is not a comedy, but a dramatic thriller, a film adaptation of the novel by American writer Douglas Kennedy “The Big Picture”, in Russian translation “Close-up”.
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I watched one French film L’homme qui voulait vivre sa vie (2010), directed by Eric Lartigaux, whose films I had never seen before, he shot before, mostly comedy. This film is not a comedy, but a dramatic thriller, a film adaptation of the novel by American writer Douglas Kennedy “The Big Picture”, in Russian translation “Close-up”. The plot, in truth, surprised me somewhat with its not strong plausibility - not in the sense of some fantasies, but in the sense of the complete illogicality of the actions of the main character. The main character of the film Paul Exben (Romain Duris) is a successful lawyer, a partner in a firm that his business partner Anna (Kathrin Deneuve) wants to give him, having learned that she is terminally ill, she wants to retire completely. Paul lives in a beautiful country house with his wife and two young sons, but the relationship between the spouses becomes increasingly tense and eventually Paul learns that his wife is cheating on him not yet with anyone, but with a successful photographer Gregoire Kremer (Eric Roof), whom he always envied in his heart, because he was fond of photography, but did not dare to publish his work. Soon the wife still decides to leave him, taking the children, and he, going to find out the relationship with Gregoire, becomes the unwitting killer of Gregoire, who, falling to the ground after Paul’s blow, stumbles into a fragment of a bottle sticking out of the ground, and dies. Paul finds nothing better than to hide the body, steal Greg’s documents and disappear himself, having previously written a fictitious letter on Greg’s behalf to his wife, then drowned the body and faked his death. Before that, he draws up fictitious documents on himself under the name of Greg, saying that he lost his passport, and goes abroad, eventually settling somewhere in a small town on the Adriatic coast. There, he slowly begins to engage in his long-standing hobby - photography and suddenly acquires not at all necessary fame, from which he then runs again with all his legs. The end is a little unexpected, whether he will manage to escape from himself this time, we do not know. What surprised me was that he had no better idea than to assume the identity of Greg, who was already a little known in certain circles, and then to engage in the same kind of activity, without thinking that it would have been easy and only a matter of time to expose him, he was a lawyer, could have figured it out. I can’t say that the film really fascinated me, especially since the personality of the hero did not cause any sympathy. In principle, you can see someone who likes such films and who will not bother with the moral qualities of the hero. Anyone who has read the book says that the book is much deeper and more interesting, but I am unlikely to read it.
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