Un beau dimanche (2014)
Directed by Nicole Garcia

Film Review

For her seventh directorial outing Nicole Garcia makes a few tentative steps into what is, for her, unfamiliar territory: social realism.  So far in her directing career, Garcia has mainly concerned herself with the educated bourgeois class to which she belongs, turning out some respectable and occasionally first-rate dramas along the way.  Un beau dimanche (Going Away) is a brave attempt to venture into the precarious, unstable lives of those who, through choice or necessity, live on the margins of society.  The central protagonists are atypical Garcia characters, one a compulsive drifter with a dark secret, the other an insecure single mum menaced by debt collectors.  The problem is that there characters appear as archetypal on screen as they do on paper, and therein lies the film's main flaw: Garcia doesn't seem to understand these people or have any real empathy with them.  It is hard to engage with such cardboard stereotypes and our interest in them evaporates long before the film reaches its painfully contrived denouement.

To be fair, the script is the only thing that lets down this film.  In almost every other respect, Un beau dimanche is an accomplished, hard-to-fault piece of cinema.  Garcia's mise-en-scène has an artistry that you would expect of a mature auteur, superior to anything found in her previous films.  The impression that she and her talented cinematographer Pierre Milon create is a constant sense that there is something nasty beneath the surface, an inner darkness that is belied by the sun-drenched visuals which suggest the exact opposite.  This strange contradiction between what we see with our eyes and what we feel lends the film an aura of mystery and understated menace which Garcia manages to sustain up until the film's midpoint, where the narrative suddenly begins to unravel.  The awkward way in which Garcia attempts to articulate her social concerns, resorting to the most risible forms of caricature, only dents the film's credibility in its second half, reducing what could have passed for a well-meaning attempt at social commentary to a pretty infantile piece of bourgeois intellectual posturing, high-minded but insincere.

Given the poor quality of the script it is remarkable that the two leads manage to hold our attention at all.  Pierre Rochefort (the son of Garcia and actor Jean Rochefort) has a captivating presence as the enigmatic protagonist Baptiste, and the fact that he survives the poisoned chalice given to him by his mother augurs well for his subsequent career.  Former TV weathergirl Louise Bourgoin also manages to make something of her hackneyed character, although the script's multiple failings ultimately prevent her from giving an entirely convincing performance.  Whilst it is certainly a treat to see Dominique Sanda back on the screen your heart can only sink to see her reduced to playing a comicbook matriarch, in the part of the film that is just a few steps away from looks like a Chabrol-directed pantomime.  What starts as a reasonable stab at a social realist romantic drama ends as a hideously contrived fairytale and if the film wasn't so handsomely crafted it would be easy to write it off as a total misfire.  If Un beau dimanche reveals anything about its director and her fellow screenwriter Jacques Fieschi it is that they appear to have some difficulty comprehending the lives of those outside their own experience.  There's something in that old saying that an author should stick to what he or she knows best.  Still, we should at least give Nicole Garcia some credit for trying to break out of her comfort zone - only by making mistakes does one achieve true greatness.

Film Synopsis

Baptiste is a loner.  A teacher in the south of France, he has never occupied a single post for more than one term.  One weekend, he finds himself in charge of Mathias, one of his pupils, who has been left behind by his neglectful father.  Mathias takes Baptiste to see his mother, Sandra, an attractive woman who, after numerous escapades, now works on the beach near to Montpellier.  The three people get on well together and soon begin to resemble a family.  But it doesn't last long.  Owing money, Sandra is forced to take flight yet again.  To help her, Baptiste must face his past and confront a painful secret...