Jamais de la vie (2015)
Directed by Pierre Jolivet

Film Review

After his moderately successful return to the thriller genre with Mains armées (2012) seasoned director Pierre Jolivet now has a stab at combining the classic French polar with gritty social realism, a marriage which other filmmakers have attempted but rarely with success.  Jamais de la vie makes a decent fist of presenting what Jolivet terms a 'polar social' but gets bogged down by its lazy reworking of familiar themes and a plot that can't help appearing a tad contrived.  The social realist part of the film is a dead-ringer for what we find in Stéphane Brizé's Le Loi de Marché (2015): a factory worker dismissed after decades of loyal service struggles to survive on benefits as his attempts to find a new job prove fruitless, driving him to drink and depression.  An improbable love affair is thrown in to add a touch of human feeling to offset the darkness, but this proves to be as pointless as adding a drop of orange juice to a punch bowl filled with vodka and gin. Having got the over-egged social realist miserabilism out of the way, the thriller part of the story then takes over and the film flips over to another familiar genre, helped by a second dose of over-baked cliché.

On the narrative front, Jamais de la vie offers nothing new and is as let down by its superficial characterisation as by its unsurprising plot developments.  Being a film noir, the downwards trajectory of the central character - a more morose than usual Olivier Gourmet (a walking advert for anti-depressants if ever there was one) - is pretty easy to divine in advance, and the film ultimately becomes a pure exercise in style, similar to Jolivet's previous thriller En plein coeur (1998).  Jérôme Alméras's slick and moody photography brings a sombre beauty to the film that makes up for Jolivet's mostly uninspired mise-en-scène, although the film's main asset is Gourmet's riveting central performance.

Why Jolivet has to keep stressing the awfulness of his main character's predicament is unfathomable - one look at Gourmet's dejected features is enough to make us aware of his inner desolation and the multiple disasters that have led him to his present state of despair.  By over-emphasising what is pretty obvious, Jolivet weakens his film and very nearly causes us to lose sympathy with his protagonist, but fortunately his lead actor wins through in the end.  Gourmet's vivid crises of conscience and determined tussle with a world that seems intent on crushing him at least make the film worth watching, although it is too cumbersome and too mechanical to impress either as a thriller or as a piece of social realism.

Film Synopsis

Franck, 52, works as a night watchman at a shopping mall in the suburbs.  Only ten years ago he was a specialised labourer and union representative, always ready for a fight.  But now he has resigned himself to being one of life's bystanders, and it bores him to tears.  One evening, he notices a four-wheel drive prowling a car park and senses that something is in the offing.  As his curiosity gets the better of his indifference, he makes his move.  At last he has an opportunity to take his life in hand...