Paul seems to have everything. He’s a partner in a successful Law Firm in Paris. Beautiful smart wife and two young children he adores. Stunning house in the country. And he’s as handsome as hell (well he’s played by Romain Duris, need I say more). Then suddenly it all starts to fall apart. His wife is having an affair with a neighbor and she ups and leaves taking the kids, and his Senior Law Partner (and close friend) announces she is terminally ill.
A distraught Paul goes around to confront Greg the neighbor who’s stolen his wife’s affections and their arguing gets out of hand, and in the ensuing fight Paul accidentally kills his rival. When Paul calms down with his lawyer’s obsession with minute detail he plans on how to dispose of the body and then disappear himself by stealing the dead man’s identity.
Greg had been an unsuccessful professional photographer, whereas this was also a career that Paul had once chosen for himself before he lost his nerve and gave it up to become a Lawyer instead. Now after faking a boating accident and having been declared dead by the Authorities, Paul is posing as Greg hidden away in some god-forsaken rural area of Hungary, and he takes up photography seriously. Word soon gets around the small community and his work is discovered and starts to get published in a Belgrade newspaper. This in turn leads to an Gallery Exhibition and fame, and of course the real risk of exposure, so he burns his bridges once more and runs off to sea and almost death.
In this excellent existentialist thriller Paul’s battle is not so much the fact that he had to abandon his wife and children for ever to impersonate another man to avoid being tried for murder, but simply that he had allowed himself to be weighed down in a life that he could never ever have been happy in the first place. This movie’s original French title ‘L’homme qui voulait vivre sa vie’ literally translates into ‘the man who wanted to live his life’.
It’s directed and co-written by Eric Lartigau, whose actress wife Marina Foïs plays Sarah, Paul’s wife in the movie. As well as starring Mr Duris in yet another mesmerizing performance as the angst-ridden Paul that always looked like he had the whole weight of the world on his shoulders, it also has super-star Catherine Deneuve in a cameo role too. It’s both exhilarating and nerve-wracking and even quite nightmarish towards the end …. and never ever a dull moment.
★★★★★★★★
