La Belle vie (2014)
Directed by Jean Denizot

Film Review

After directing two short films, Mouche (2007) and Je me souviens (2009), Jean Denizot made an impressive feature debut with La Belle vie, taking as his inspiration a much publicised news story, the Fortin Affair.  In 1997, Xavier Fortun eloped off with his two children, defying a court order which placed them in the custody of his recently divorced wife Catherine.  It is a story replete with human interest and Denizot mines this mercilessly, creating a delicate coming-of-age drama that has immense visual appeal and is easy to engage with at a deep emotional level.  The film is by no means perfect - at times the drama is weighed down by a surfeit of unnecessary dialogue that is a tad too explicit in exposing the protagonists' inner thoughts - but it has, all the same, a warmth and sincerity that make it utterly beguiling.

Denizot freely admits to having been inspired by Jean Renoir, particularly in the way he uses the breathtaking countryside on the banks of the Loire to express his characters' yearning for freedom. There are certainly strong echoes of Renoir's bucolic odes Partie de campagne and Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe in the seductively photographed riverside sequences.  Another obvious influence is American cinema, with some fleeting allusions to familiar road movies and westerns, which also endow the film with an intoxicating spirit of freedom and independence.  Mark Twain's popular heroes Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer find a near Gallic cousin in the younger son, Sylvain, as he makes his tentative steps towards adulthood, torn between the duty to the father he loves and his yearning to sever the filial bond and pursue his own path in life.
 
Lead actors Nicolas Bouchaud and Zacharie Chasseriaud both bring a touching authenticity to their unwaveringly naturalistic portrayals of the law-breaking father and his emotionally conflicted younger son, powerfully evoking the bond between the two characters who have yet to face up to the prospect of their inevitable separation.  Denizot shows somewhat more subtlety and inspiration in his mise-en-scène than in his writing, so whilst La Belle vie occasionally snags on its dramatic artifices and redundant wordiness, it nonetheless carries us with it and seldom completes a sequence without delivering at least one forceful emotional jolt.  There can be little doubt that, after this auspicious debut, Jean Denizot is a name to watch out for.

Film Synopsis

In the wake of an acrimonious divorce, Yves makes the snap decision to go on the run with his two young sons, Sylvain and Pierre.  Rather than surrender custody of the boys to his ex-wife, he prefers to break the law, and for the next ten years he goes into hiding in the countryside, becoming ever more attached to his sons as the seasons pass.  Yves scrapes by as best he can by selling products in markets, whilst taking charge of his boys' education.  Now that Sylvain and Pierre have reached adolescence, they are becoming a handful.

To avoid being caught by the police, Pierre, the older boy, is forced to run away.  Now Yves has only his younger son Sylvain to keep him company, in his makeshift home on a little island on the Loire River.  Things become more complicated for them both when, one day, Sylvain meets Gilda, a girl of his own age, by the river.  The two teenagers are attracted to each other but Sylvain's reluctance to talk about his own personal circumstances makes it difficult for him to pursue a relationship with the young woman.  It seems that Yves isn't yet ready for the day when both of his sons will leave him of their own accord...