Le Grand bain (2018)
Directed by Gilles Lellouche

Film Review

For his first solo bash as a director, Gilles Lellouche takes his inspiration from the classic British movie The Full Monty (1997) but ends up delivering an aquatic ensemble buddy movie that struggles to keep its head above water.  Le Grand bain (a.k.a. Sink or Swim) was one of the French mainstream hits of 2018, attracting an impressive audience of 4.3 million and garnering favourable reviews from a wide section of the French press.  It even managed to obtain ten César nominations in 2019 - an incredible feat for such an overtly commercial film.  How could a film that made such a big splash in France fail to muster not much more than a light shower outside its borders?

This is not the first film that Lellouche has helmed.  In 2004, he co-directed Narco with Tristan Aurouet, after having made a number of short films and pop videos.  Since the early 2000s, he has pursued a successful career in front of the camera and is now one of French cinema's most popular and most highly paid actors, at home in a wide range of genres from  thriller (À bout portant, L'Enquête), to drama (Les Petits mouchoirs, Rock'N'Roll) and comedy (Ma part du gâteau, Plonger).  With Le Grand bain, Gilles Lellouche makes a determined effort to forge a new career path, and whilst the film has many shortcomings, there are good reasons for thinking that a high-profile filmmaking career may lie ahead of him.

For his grand debut, Lellouche could not have assembled a more impressive ensemble cast.  Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Guillaume Canet, Benoît Poelvoorde, Marina Foïs and Virginie Efira form a roll call of raw talent that most French filmmakers would sell their grandmothers into slavery for.  With such a strong cast, Lellouche could hardly fail to grab a major box office success, but in his single-minded pursuit of mainstream popularity he passes up a golden opportunity to deliver a genuinely worthy peice of cinema, one that is likely to stand the test of time.

The most unforgivable failing of Le Grand bain is that it is such an obvious and lazy rip-off of The Full Monty (the film's French trailer went out of its way to make the comparison).  This is apparent not only in its central premise (an unlikely assortment of losers banding together in the hope of regaining their self-respect) but also in its knowing feminine artiness, which is brilliantly ironic in the British film, far less so here.  The issue of male identity at the turn of the third millennium is as pertinent today as it was twenty years ago, when Robert Carlyle and his mates from Sheffield resorted to taking off their clothes in an effort to regain their lost self-esteem.  But rather than giving the premise a contemporary French twist with a deeper meaning, Lellouche is content merely to rehash the concept as a shallow populist crowd-pleaser, without even attempting to understand what lies beneath it.

The film's lack of substance is nowhere more evident than in the excruciating dearth of characterisation.  We are never given the chance to see the eight male protagonists as individuals - we only see them as an ensemble, a collection of familiar uglies that only seem to exist as part of a group.  As the most sensitive and fully developed member of the band, Philippe Katerine stands out from the crowd and gives the most consistently engaging performance (for which he was rewarded in 2019 with the César for Best Supporting Actor); his male co-stars mostly fail to be anything more than bland imitations of characters they have played far more successfully in other films.  Leïla Bekhti's bossy coach is just a shouty mouth on wheels - she is funny at first but soon becomes irritating, just another wearisome stock character: the failed sportsperson who takes her frustration out on the easily cowed unfortunates she is coaching.

Though full of good intentions, the script struggles to make the grade, either as comedy or drama.  Its emotionality is painfully forced and the lack of character depth denudes the film of all but a thin veneer of charm and poignancy.  Lellouche's mise-en-scène shows far more promise than his writing.  It is hard not to be wowed by the balletic fluidity of the camerawork, which brings an arresting visual poetry to a number of sequences that momentarily recalls Jean Vigo's astonishing work on Taris (1931) and L'Atalante (1934).  Alas, these infrequent inspired interludes aside, Le Grand bain has precious little to offer true connoisseurs of French cinema. Overlong and shockingly derivative for the most part, this forced feel-good offering relies too heavily on superficial crowd-pleasing tactics to make much of in impact.  It just washes over you, like water off a duck's back.

Film Synopsis

Bertrand, Laurent, Marcus, Simon, Thierry, John, Bastile and Avanish - eight men from very different backgrounds - are all beginning to find life a bit too much for them.  Family breakdown, professional failings, depression and alcoholism have taken their toll and now they face a bleak future, each man caught in the grip of a fierce mid-life crisis.  On the spur of the moment these eight unfortunates each elects to join a synchronised swimming team, to participate in a world championship.  The eight aspiring swimmers show little promise of success but their coaches - Delpine, a former champion, and Amanda, an ex-sportswoman now confined to a wheelchair - are determined to make something of them.  Driven to the limit of what they are capable of by their determined trainers, the eight men begin to find a new purpose in their lives and at last recover their self-esteem and zest for living...