KEY POINTS:
Herald Rating: * * * *
Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Jean-Pierre Darroussin
Director: Jean Becker
Running time: 109 mins
Rating: M, drug use and offensive language
Screening: Bridgeway, Lido, Matakana, Rialto
Verdict: A beguiling and beautifully realised film in which two men, who haven't seen each other since they were kids, sit and talk.
Anyone lucky enough to have seen 2001's The Children of the Marshland, the last collaboration between Becker and writer Jules Cosmos shown in New Zealand, will know what to expect from this. That film was a charming sunlit idyll, set in rural France in the 1920s, in which two men pass their time catching frogs and snails and getting in and out of scrapes.
"The drama is in the detail and the film's charm resides in its unhurried, contemplative rhythms and its meticulous observations of daily life," I wrote at the time, and the comment applies as much to Conversations, my favourite of the fiction films in the last festival and likely to be included in my top 10 of the year.
Two men, who knew each other as children, meet in middle age. Their paths have diverged widely before crossing again, and watching the movie, which is a slow revelation of character to us and to the characters themselves, is like eavesdropping on a series of conversations that are wise, witty and wry.
For the French, the examined life is the only kind worth making a film about - think Louis Malle's My Dinner With Andre or most of the films of Eric Rohmer, and consider yourself warned that the action here is all internal.
But in the hands of two great French actors, it becomes utterly engrossing.
Based on a memoir by French painter Henri Cueco (an English translation has been published this month), it introduces us to two unnamed characters, one a landscape painter (the ubiquitous Auteuil) who comes from Paris to his childhood home in the country, which he has inherited from his mother. The garden is a mess and when he hires a local gardener (Darroussin, recently seen in Red Lights and How Much Do You Love Me?) to clean it up, the pair recognise each other as schoolmates whose shared history includes a sensational prank.
It's misleading to say that nothing happens - a plot development involving an illness adds a frisson of tension which, in the sleepy context of the whole, has the force of a car bomb, and there's a fabulous sequence in a Paris gallery where the Auteuil character says something of a sort that should be said far more often.
But the film's strongest scenes are when the two men, effortlessly leaping the obvious chasms of social class and life history, exploit a natural rapport - as characters and actors - and just talk. They recall marriages and jobs, work and family, hopes and disappointments, and Becker, having placed them in a ravishing rural setting, is smart enough to keep his distance and let them work.
Like many French films, it's best not seen on an empty stomach - when these blokes get together, they don't have beer and peanuts. But no other warning is required for a beautifully realised film.
