Les Châteaux de sable (2015)
Directed by Olivier Jahan

Film Review

It has been fifteen years since film director Olivier Jahan made his promising debut feature Faites comme si je n'étais pas là (2000), giving Jérémie Renier and Emma de Caunes roles near the start of their respective careers.  After making a few shorts in the interim, Jahan makes a long overdue return to cinema with Les Châteaux de sable, with de Caunes (now a fully fledged film star) paired up with Renier's older brother Yannick.  For his second feature, Jahann shares the screenwriting duties with playwright Diastème, who directed one of the more controversial French films of the year Un Français (2015).  Here, Johann is on somewhat safer ground with a fairly routine romantic drama that recycles several ideas whilst throwing in a few quirky innovations.  The sand castles of the title provide a metaphor for human relationships, which can be made, broken and remade, although ultimately all is washed away when the tide comes in.

It is hard to get excited about a film that is mostly a retread of a familiar scenario featuring an estranged couple getting it together for what is in all probability the last time, perversely in the house of the recently deceased father of one of them.  Cue plenty of rose-scented nostalgia trips assisted by pretty black-and-white photographs and sentimental music.  The one unexpected ingredient is a bouncy estate agent (Jeanne Rosa in her breakthrough year, having also taken the female lead in Diastème's film), whose welcome presence prevents the film from being drearily predictable all the way through - she even gets to sing the song by Georges Brassens that gives the film its title.

Jahan's attempts to pep up a fairly mundane drama include an intrusive and fairly unnecessary voiceover from a party whose identity isn't revealed until the end of the film and the creepy Godardian device of characters reciting a text straight to camera.  Fortunately, Johann's Nouvelle Vague mimicry goes no further and his mostly restrained mise-en-scène gets the most out of the three lead actors, whose solid performances are the best thing the film has to offer.  The succession of mawkish flashbacks which show de Caunnes reminiscing on her dearly departed father is one sickly indulgence the film could have done without, but other soggy clichés are so well-woven into the narrative that you hardly notice them.  The singular beauty of the raw Breton landscape is sensitively captured by cinematographer Fabien Benzaquen, lending a suitably brumal poetry to what is a mostly likeable film - one that touches a nerve or two with its gentle lament of the passing of the years.

Film Synopsis

After the death of her father, thirty-something Éléonore learns that she has inherited his house in Brittany.  With her photography business not going as well as it might, Éléonore desperately needs to sell the house to see her through her present financial worries.  Unable to set foot in her father's house alone, she persuades her ex-partner Samuel to accompany her to Brittany.  Even though Éléonore and Samuel have been apart for several years their erstwhile feelings for one another are still very much alive.  Closeted together in the house that Éléonore is so keen to offload they are in for a long and eventful weekend that will be full of surprises...