19/10/2009

French director Cédric Kahn returns to the world of adults for Regrets [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the follow-up to his children’s film The Airplane. The film is the only fully French production in Competition at the Rome Film Festival, currently underway.

Italo-French actress Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi teams up again on-screen with her It’s Easier for a Camel [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Munich co-star Yvan Attal, and Kahn casts them as former lovers who have long since moved on with their lives.

Taking a page from Truffaut’s The Woman Next Door, the two meet again after many years, and an almost animal-like (or at far from rational) passion flares up once more, even though both have long since married a new partner.

Attal is Mathieu, a well-mannered Paris-based architect who earns a decent living but who doesn’t take risks in life. This changes when Mathieu goes back to his village of birth in the south when his widowed mother is hospitalised and then dies, leaving him to look after the arrangements for her funeral and the family mansion.

While there, he runs into former flame Maya (Bruni-Tedeschi), who is setting up a vineyard with her coarse husband, Franck (Philippe Katerine). He takes risks by the dozen and is in every way Mathieu’s opposite, which is perhaps why Maya again falls under his spell.

Working with two actors who play variations on the roles of French adulterers, the film’s tone veers between a serious drama on that oh-so French subject and a caricature of the same.

Céline Bozon’s cinematography is likewise unsteady, as if not only to reflect the tumultuous happenings in the characters’ lives but also the uncertainty of the director, who tries to play the emotional uncertainty and eruptions of passion and doubt as a thriller but ends up with something that is neither fish nor fowl.

The film reportedly suffered from a switch in producer before filming and also lost several screenwriters along the way, with Kahn finally the only one credited for the film’s screenplay.

The film was already released in France by Mars Distribution last month.