LITTLE WHITE LIES (Guillaume Canet). 154 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (May 27). See listing. Rating: NN
In his gripping 2006 thriller Tell No One, the actor Guillaume Canet demonstrated a strong directorial sensibility and a knack for infusing American moviemaking flavour into French cinema. It was an art house movie that moved like a Hollywood thriller.
His new feature is inspired by another key American genre – the ensemble drama minted by John Sayles’s Return Of The Secaucus Seven and Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill. It’s not as good a fit.
Little White Lies follows a close-knit group of Paris friends in their 30s and 40s on their annual seaside vacation. This trip is tinged with tragedy – one of their number has just been hospitalized after a bad motorcycle accident – but everyone’s decided to soldier on and enjoy the time away, ignoring their unspoken pain.
The first half of the film is pleasant enough, as the cast (including François Cluzet, Marion Cotillard, Laurent Lafitte and Benoît Magimel) establish their characters against a series of gorgeous locations.
But as the movie rolls on, it becomes clear that it’s gotten away from Canet in the editing room. Subplots shift around awkwardly, the pacing slackens, and the movie seems to lose its sense of who the characters are, indicting them as narcissistic petit bourgeoisie and then deciding they’re just lovable scamps.
What starts out as a charming diversion turns into a bloated exercise in empty charm.
