Working the classes

>> A lawyer ditches the bourgeoisie for the writer’s life in the hit-and-miss Le Pressentiment

by MALCOLM FRASER

Hard-working French character actor Jean-Pierre Darroussin (A Very Long Engagement, The Taste of Others) makes his directorial debut in Le Pressentiment, an adaptation of Emmanuel Bove’s novel. Darroussin stars as Charles Benesteau, a bourgeois Parisian lawyer who leaves his job and wife to pursue a career as a writer. To the horror of his upper-crust family, he moves into a run-down apartment in an immigrant district.

When his neighbour Thomas (Ivan Franek) comes looking for some free legal advice, then gets hauled away for hospitalizing his wife, Darroussin suddenly finds himself taking care of Thomas’s 13-year-old daughter Sabrina (Amandine Jannin). He quickly becomes embroiled in a complicated family and community drama as his closeness to the young girl attracts the disapproval of the neighbours who sought out his help.

Le Pressentiment is, among other things, a sort of collision between two subgenres of French cinema. Films like the Dardenne brothers’ L’Enfant and Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine depict the realities of lower-income life that are often overlooked in the typical bourgeois French comedies and dramas, where the protagonist’s hardest obstacle is usually micromanaging his sex life. Darroussin’s film parachutes a high-society character into the inner-city environment, and much of the film’s tension comes from these two worlds colliding.

But if Darroussin sensibly abandons the fluffy frivolity of many of his cinematic countrymen, he can’t quite shake some of the other clichés of French film. As an actor, he spends a lot of time staring into the distance with ambiguous existential angst, and as a director, he sets up a lot of scenes where people sit in uncomfortable silence for agonizingly long periods of time. His approach to pacing is on the far side of low-key, which can work perfectly well in the right hands, but requires a certain aesthetic control that’s not quite within the grasp of a first-time director.

The mood of the film keeps shifting between intrigue and alienation; the uncertain dramatic structure, plus a strange narrative device that pops up towards the end, ultimately tip the scales towards a distancing effect. But the strong performances, especially from co-writer Valérie Stroh as a mercurial neighbourhood mother, and the intriguing themes earn Darroussin good marks for effort.

Le Pressentiment opens this Friday, April 13

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