Marion Cotillard and François Cluzet (MPI Media)In the red light of a noisy Paris nightclub, an unrepentant rogue is at work. He charges out of a bathroom after snorting lines of coke, he makes out with other men’s girlfriends, and he stumbles out of the bar into the dawn. All cranked up, he gets on his scooter as the camera follows him. Little White Lies begins with an uninterrupted shot that captures the energy of Ludo, who you may not recognize at first as Jean Dujardin, Oscar winner for his performance in The Artist. This long shot perfectly captures Ludo‘s bad boy spirit, and might make you think, “Hey, maybe I should get a scooter!” Suddenly, Ludo gets hit by a truck.
The ensemble drama follows Ludo’s friends as they visit him in intensive care, concerned about his mangled face but deciding to go on their planned annual vacation without him anyway. If Ludo is the bacchanalian leader of this group, Max (Francois Cluzet, most recently seen in The Intouchables) is the adult—to a fault. He’s a type A control freak who loses his shit over a three-day growth of lawn that nobody can see but him, and that’s just for starters.
None of these people are particularly sympathetic. The title refers to the lies everybody tells themselves and each other as they ignore their friend in the hospital and try to have a good time in their beach house. The movie is filled with clichés and revelations that may be French in attitude but are just like the kind of American clichés and revelations that lead to golden statuettes at Oscar-time, and this thing is somehow a smash hit across the pond. But, non, je dis!
Good Lovin’ it’s not! Laurent Lafitte, Gilles Lellouche and Marion Cottilard (MPI Media)The first half hour works well enough. We get to know the characters, who include Max’s conflicted friend Vincent (Benoît Magimel, who sparred with Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher), and Ludo’s old flame Marie (Marion Cotillard). The excellent cast makes it hard to look away. But when a string of American oldies turns the movie into a two and a half hour version of The Big Chill, any harder emotions are thrown out for easy nostalgia. Didn’t these people grow up with yeh-yeh music and Eurodisco anyway?
Director Guillaume Canet last film was 2006’s excellent thriller Tell No One, but that taut entertainment is a far cry from this bloated paint by numbers script. He gets uniformly excellent performances from his cast as they flail around in that potent human cliché of looking for and avoiding connection. Cotillard is particularly strong as a woman who wants to have her casual-sex cake and eat her intimacy, too. But for all the time we spend with these characters, there is little character development. Most of them have learned nothing by the end of the movie, despite what a rugged, salt-of-the-earth fisherman does at the end of the movie to demonstrate his emotional superiority to those well-dressed phonies. What does he do? Spoiler alert: he pours sand on a grave. Little White Lies has an attractive and accomplished cast who keeps things as watchable as they can, but let me save you two and a half hours of your life and suggest you just go out for pie instead.
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Written and directed by Guillaume Canet
With François Cluzet, Marion Cotillard, Benoît Magimel, Gilles Lellouche, Jean Dujardin
Running time: 154 minutes
Not rated: contains drugs, sex and French people having fun to American oldies.
Opens today at Landmark Bethesda Row
