Joyce Glasser reviews The Innocent (August 25, 2023), Cert. 15, 95 mins. In cinemas
Louis Garrel, now forty, has been a working actor since the age of six. His father is the director Philipe, his grandfather the director, Maurice, and his godfather is Truffaut’s former muse, the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. In between appearing in films for his father; for director Christopher Honoré, and for various other directors, including Roman Polanski, for a change of pace Garrel directs (writes and co-writes) and stars in his own films, The Innocent being the fourth.
Garrel excelled in his role as the New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard in Michel Hazanavicius’s (The Artist) hilarious Redoubtable, but he more frequently portrays a boy or man in illicit relationships or a single guy with a complicated love life. In The Innocent, Garrel plays to type, fashioning a zany heist movie plot around a romcom, both more Gallic than American. The movie has heart, idiosyncratic, sharply observed characters and ingenious plot twists, but at times it feels more like a pantomime than a film you can engage with.
Abel (Garrel) works as a tour guide in an aquarium with Clémence (Noémie Merlant, Cate Blanchett’s assistant in the film Tár), the best friend of his recently deceased wife. As well as their interest in fish and underwater life, they share their love of the deceased, a memory that unites them but freezes their relationship in the past.
Abel is getting on with life when his vivacious mother, Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg), a character actress who conducts acting workshops in prisons, announces her upcoming marriage. The problem for Abel is that the fiancé is Sylvie’s star pupil, Michel (Roschdy Zem), an ex-con with the sex appeal of a European Johnny Cash.
Abel feels responsible for his soft-touch mother, who has a history of bad choices in men, but she ignores her son’s pleading. When Michel is released, he and Sylvie decide to make a fresh start and open a florist shop.
Humour and psychologist profiling is exploited in Abel’s mistrust of his new step-father, and his inept attempts to catch him out. For one thing, he wonders where the money for the shop and its lavish opening came from. Abel recruits Clémence to help him spy on Michel, but she takes a liking to the charmer and loses interest when Abel’s attempts to prevent his mother from being hurt again prove fruitless.
Garrel has played a character with “mummy” issues before, most notably in Ma Mère (My Mother). He has also played a character named Abel before: in his three previous films as director co-writer: Crusade, The Unfaithful Husband, Two Friends, with the plot of Two Friends also involving an ex-con and an actor.
But the plot of The Innocent is completely fresh when Abel’s instincts prove correct, if misguided. In order to secure the payment on the flower shop Sylvie wanted, Michel is dragged into one last, fittingly absurd crime: the theft of a shipment of caviar from a delivery van.
When Abel learns the reason for the heist and realises that turning Michel in would break his mother’s heart, he and Clémence decide to help out.
The delivery driver’s routine has been studied, and Michel and his accomplice Jean Paul (Jean-Claude Pautot) know exactly what time the driver stops for dinner at a roadside restaurant, what he orders, and how long the meal lasts. Abel and Clémence’s task is to distract the driver while Michel breaks into the van and transfers the caviar to their vehicle in the car park.
Just how they manage to hold the bemused driver’s attention is ingenious, a spin on Shakespeare’s metaphor that all the world’s a stage. Michel and Sylvie are not the only actors in the extended family and Abel and Clémence’s heartfelt performances surprise even them.
The long heist sequence is a hard act to follow, and unfortunately, the prolonged ending is not the one we want. Garrel, however, is just the ticket and, one suspects, the full range of his talents remains untapped.
