L'Homme fidèle (2018)
Directed by Louis Garrel

Film Review

After the success of his first full-length film Les Deux amis (2015), actor-turned-director Louis Garrel returns with a similarly well-crafted variation on the love-triangle theme.  As in his first film, Garrel plays a leading role, this time partnered by two talented and charismatic performers Laetitia Casta and Lily-Rose Depp.  Skipping effortlessly between dramatic intrigue and laugh-out-loud farce, helped by a script that is both slick and witty, L'Homme fidèle (A Faithful Man) is such a brazen homage to the French New Wave that it is easy to forget it was made over half a century after that glorious phase of French cinema had come and gone.

Louis Garrel is a son of la Nouvelle Vague in both a figurative and literal sense.  His father was the highly regarded auteur filmmaker Philippe Garrel, who first made his impact in the late 1960s with innovative avant-garde films such as Le Révélateur (1968), before going on to prove his serious auteur credentials in such spellbinding works as J'entends plus la guitare (1991).  His mother, the actress Brigitte Sy, has also made her mark recently as a filmmaker, with Les Mains libres (2010) and L'Astragale (2015).  Louis Garrel's more than passing resemblance to New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud is presumably what led him to cast himself as a close relation of Antoine Doinel in L'Homme fidèle, which owes a great deal to Francois Truffaut's mid-period comedies Baisers volés (1968) and Domicile conjugale (1970) (with a soupçon of La Mariée était en noir thrown in for good measure).

Garrel exercised good judgement in co-authoring his film with a more experienced writer, the incredibly prolific man of letters Jean-Claude Carrière.  The latter not only collaborated with Garrel's father on L'Ombre des femmes (2015); he also scripted some of French cinema's enduring classics, including several for Luis Buñuel: Belle de jour (1967) and Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972).  Carrière's idiosyncratic dark humour and penchant for the surreal manifests itself throughout L'Homme fidèle, bringing to it an underlying strain of Hitchcockian menace to counterpoint its whimsical Truffautesque humour.

Served by an admirable screenplay that manages to stay true to life no matter how bizarre and improbable the story becomes, the three lead actors soon form a compelling trio, with Garrel appearing at his most disarmingly amiable as a narcissiic but decent sort who is hopelessly torn between a merciless man-eater (Depp) and a possible cold-hearted murderess (Casta).  The film doesn't quite have the depth and maturity of Garrel's first feature but it is every bit as satisfying - and everything that a French New Wave addict could possibly ask for.

Film Synopsis

Abel, a journalist in his early thirties, has been in a settled relationship with his girlfriend Marianne for three years.  Then, suddenly, she tells him she has been made pregnant by his best friend Paul, whom she now intends to marry.  Ten years later, Abel re-enters Marianne's life after learning that Paul has recently died in his sleep, leaving her to bring up their young son Joseph alone.  Before he knows it, Abel has resumed his conjugal life with Marianne, but becomes anxious when her eight-year-old son confides in him that Paul was poisoned by his wife.  The situation becomes further complicated when Paul's emotionally unstable younger sister Eve shows up and begins luring Abel into an intense love affair...