L’homme de Sa Vie/The Man of My Life

Pastoral issues

L’HOMME DE SA VIE: Will Frédéric still want Frédérique after his night with Hugo?

In Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu|The Rules of the Game, everyone had his or her reasons. In Zabou Breitman’s earnest, overwrought pastoral, people have issues. Set also on a summery rural estate, it involves the awakening of satisfied bourgeois Frédéric (Bernard Campan). His wife, Frédérique (Léa Drucker), is at his bedside, and he’s ready for action, but the first of many guests arrive. As it turns out, that might have been the last time he’d be up for the task, as among the visitors is their neighbor Hugo (Charles Berling), who at dinner announces that he’s a “fag” and then talks to Frédéric till dawn, undermining his host’s certainties about love, family, freedom, and perhaps even heterosexuality. Breitman keeps flashing back to this tête-à-tête, and that’s one of the more modest of her self-consciously whimsical stylistic tricks. (The long close-up of an unpuckering vinyl cushion did it for me.) Nonetheless, Berling’s sublime face almost succeeds in overcoming the Oprah-ish resolutions at the end. French | 114 minutes | MFA: November 9, 10, 17, 23, 24