Films about filmmaking are rarely something everyone can enjoy, even the effort to use Rober de Niro to attract audiences to the adaptation of producer Art Linson’s memoirs failed pretty miserably. So it is with some surprise that my first acknowledgement of this review is that this film about filmmaking is also a film of great humanity, and an absorbing portrait of one man juggling his obsession and his life.

Gregoire Canvel is that man. He is approaching middle age, has a beautiful wife and two young daughters who he loves dearly. He is also an obsessive producer whose production company, Moon, is struggling with difficult directors and even more difficult tax men. As the pressure builds and builds, Gregoire’s charming and controlled exterior begins to crack, and suddenly crumbles as the plot turns to the dramatic.

The biggest strength of this film, and ironically its biggest weakness, is its unwavering commitment to realism. To portray Gregoire’s charm and magnetism from the start, we really solely on the remarkable performance of Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, to capture the loving atmosphere of this family operating under difficult circumstances, we are fully in the hands of Chiara Caselli, Alice de Lencquesaing, Alice Gautier and Manelle Driss. That it all works is testament to the skills of each of these performers, as well as to writer/director Mia Hansen-Lve.

This visual and emotional candour pushes the stroyline beyond one of filmmaking, and of an obsessive desire to create, into a very human tale of a man (and his family) in the midst of crisis. The trouble is that what this realism brings in terms of character identification, it saps away from show-stopping drama.

There are moments within the story which are horrific, when their implications are fully considered. But because of Hansen-Lve’s commitment to the real, we are rarely ever hit with the fill impact of events (with one notable exception which may make your heart stop). This means that the film can be hard going at times, as it takes time and effort to comprehend the complexity of these people whose lives unfold on screen. They are never reduced to bitesize emotional events, and are always fully immersed in the detailed world around them.

The trouble is that although this brings much that goes above and beyond the niche interest ‘film for filmmakers’ that this could have been, it makes it much more difficult to follow and instantly respond to. The result is a film that is at once brilliantly human, and too real to be recognizable on the big screen as human.

It’s a paradox, and perhaps that’s all to the film’s credit, but this is certainly not easy going: even it is a beautifully performed human drama.

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By: Mike Edwards