If life is empty, it is hard to fill, whether you have money or not.
The original film by Alain Gessua, assistant to such great classics of cinema as Marcel Carnet and Jacques Becker, invites you to plunge into semi-reality against the backdrop of Lake Geneva.
Have you ever dreamed of becoming the hero of a beloved book and living his life? To survive all his travels? Meet the same interesting people, captivating women or charming men, and lead the same exciting, eventful life? If so, you will understand Robert, one of the main characters of this film.
Bored rich and not without a fair share of infantilism Robert, taking advantage of the period of stagnation at his favorite writer, invites him (with a charming wife) to his villa in Switzerland. Debts of the writer grow, ideas for new comics do not come and he begins to invent all sorts of murders and love stories involving a little nervous Robert. And that's where it started.
The intermittent inserts from comics, driving music and blurring the boundaries of the real and the imaginary remind me very much of Antonioni’s “Photomagnification” released a year earlier, although I can assume that this is only a personal association.
This is not a film in which someone should empathize, and you are unlikely to succeed, but this does not mean that the play of Cassel, Duhossua and Auger failed. Quite the opposite. Especially “live” and natural looks the character of Jean-Pierre Cassel – this brilliant look, loving earthly pleasures of a man – came out very well.
In general, more than an interesting film with a suspiciously low number of views, given the democratic film language, the charm of the characters and the twisting of the plot.