En liberté! (2018)
Directed by Pierre Salvadori

Film Review

For the past quarter of a century, writer-director Pierre Salvadori has carved a distinctive niche for himself in French cinema, with a series of films (mostly unhinged comedies) that combine an unflagging flair for innovation with a decidedly skewed view on life.  In his latest film En liberté! (a.k.a. The Trouble With You), he does justice to those masters of American comedy (Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch) to whom his unique brand of cinematic zaniness owes a considerable debt.  An effortless melange of classic comedy thriller and rom-com, Salvadori's ninth feature is his most wildly uninhibited and entertaining yet - a completely liberated farce that somehow manages to be deliriously funny and true to life, no matter how ludicrous the plot becomes.

In a similar vein to the director's early films Cible émouvante (1993) and Comme elle respire (1998), En liberté! derives its humour from the insane juxtaposition of the fantastic and the everyday, mirroring the central protagonists' daydreaming tendencies and inability to live in the real world.  The heroine Yvonne, a recently widowed cop, cannot accept the truth that her husband was not an honourable police officer but an out-and-out villain (a model ripou in fact), so she tells her son stories that make him out to be a hero.  By day, she tries to atone for at least one of her dead husband's crimes by preventing a wrongly convicted man from ending up back in prison.

That man, Antoine, has been driven seriously doolally by his long spell in jail and now intends to embark on a life of crime, even though he has absolutely no aptitude for this.  Antoine's pathetic attempts at criminality are eithed botched by his own ineptitude or thwarted by Yvonne's well-meaning but equally clumsy attempts to keep him out of mischief.  As you would expect in a Pierre Salvadori film, things get increasingly out of hand as the protagonists' grip on reality continues to loosen and we are thrown ever deeper into the realms of absurdist fantasy.

In contrast to too many of his contemporaries, Salvadori knows that the key to great comedy is that it must be anchored in reality if it is to have any effect.  This is reflected most strongly in his choice of lead actors, who tend to be more naturally inclined towards straight drama than comedy (the names Guillaume Depardieu and Marie Trintignant spring readily to mind).  En liberté! maintains this idiosyncrasy, its two lead roles going to actors who are far better known as serious dramatic actors than comic performers.

Adèle Haenel has garnered considerable acclaim for her strikingly naturalistic performances in films such as Thomas Cailley's Les Combattants (2014) and the Dardenne brothers' La Fille inconnue (2016), and her co-star Pio Marmaï is no less widely respected, for his authentic portrayals in numerous worthy films that include Lea Fazer's Maestro (2014) and Rémi Bezançon's Nos futurs (2015).

It is one of the defining characteristics of Salvadori's cinema to take believable, fully-developed characters - the kind of  flawed but amiable individuals we run up against every day - and place them in the most far-fetched of situations, with the result that reality and fantasy become so hopelessly entangled that we cannot tell where one ends and the other takes over.  This is how the wildly unpredictable comedy springs into being, the natural product of some strange kind of alchemical fusion.

As Haenel and Marmaï make no attempt to be funny, their characters remain true-to-life throughout and so we never lose sight of the human drama that underpins the film. And yet the situations into which they are thrown are so bizarre that you just cannot stop yourself from laughing.  Marmaï appears particularly at home in Salvadori's eccentrically warped universe, effortlessly grabbing our sympathies as the sympathetic loser whilst making us laugh out loud whenever his efforts to enact his mad delusions backfire.  It is hard not to liken Marmaï to the great Pierre Richard in his glory days of the 1970s - it takes a comedian of rare ability to make us cry and laugh at the same time.

En liberté! may not have enjoyed the commercial success of Salvadori's biggest hit so far, Hors de prix (2006), but it is a far more satisfying and innovative excursion into rom-com territory, with (incredibly) a poetic sensibility somehow finding its way into the crazily undulating gag-packed narrative.  The warm reaction the film received from the critics, along with its nine César nominations in 2019, is a sign that Pierre Salvadori is a long, long way from losing his touch.  The most consistently brilliant French comedy of 2018, En liberté! marks a new high point for a director who just cannot stop making us laugh.  And long may he continue to do so.

Film Synopsis

Yvonne Santi, a young police officer, is still coming to terms with the death of her husband Jean, a police superintendent who died heroically two years previously in the course of his work.  Every night, she recounts her husband's brave exploits to her young son Théo and has no doubt that Jean was a credit to his profession.  Then, in the course of a routine investigation, Yvonne learns the truth about her husband.  Far from being a model cop, he was a corrupt, self-serving villain, and it was to cover his tracks that he had an innocent man, Antoine Parent, arrested for taking part in a jewel robbery.  Although deeply shocked by this discovery, Yvonne takes the advice of her colleague Louis and does nothing.

But after Antoine's release from prison a short while later, Yvonne is driven by remorse to take an interest in him.  Antoine's attempts to resume his former life prove difficult.  Relations with his wife Agnès are strained and he resorts to petty crime.  It is only through the intervention of his guardian angel Yvonne that he evades being arrested and sent back to prison.  It isn't long before Yvonne's friendly concern for Antoine turns into a deep romantic attachment but a budding relationship is threatened when the troubled Antoine is drawn increasingly into a life of crime.  The injustice of his wrongful imprisonment weighs heavily on the young man and will not go away until he has committed a crime comparable to the one for which he was convicted...