someone i loved (je l'aimais) 2009 region free dvd5 french bcbc

Someone I Loved (Je l'aimais) is a 2009 french film directed by Zabou Breitman and starring Daniel Auteuil, Marie-Josée Croze and Florence Loiret Caille.

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Synopsis

Over the course of one night, Pierre shares an important secret with his daughter-in-law Chloé. This secret has been haunting him for 20 years and brings him face to face with himself, his contradictions and choices, his role as a man and his failings. His secret love for Mathilde, for whom he didn’t dare abandon everything, choosing instead a safer and more familiar path. Over the course of one night, we learn about the life of a man who didn’t dare.



Cast

Daniel Auteuil, Marie-Josée Croze, Florence Loiret Caille Christiane Millet Geneviève Mnich Winston Ong Olivia Ross Antonin Chalon Ysée Dumay Duteil Clémentine Houée Woon Ling Hau Ludovic Pinette Alain Darlay Stéphane Le Coq de Querlan Jonathan Cohen



Variety film review

Justin Chang

April 21, 2009

“Tell me a story,” a newly abandoned wife implores her sympathetic father-in-law in the lushly romantic drama “Someone I Loved.” And so the older gentleman conspires, with French actress-turned-helmer Zabou Breitman, to recount his own illicit affair with a woman many years his junior — the telling of which is shot through with moments of quietly dazzling filmmaking brio that compensate somewhat for a predictable, over-idealized narrative of romance and regret. Ravishingly photographed study of the pleasures and consequences of adulterous passion looks poised for a solid local embrace May 6, and should prove as exportable as its globe-trotting central duo.



Recently dumped by her cheating husband Adrien, morose Chloe (Florence Loiret-Caille) and her two young daughters are spirited away to a remote cabin by Adrien’s father, Pierre (Daniel Auteuil). The film unfolds its tale of l’amour fou as a series of flashbacks, as kindly Pierre tries to console Chloe with his memories of how he found and lost the great love of his life.



In a charmingly extended meet-cute sequence set in a Hong Kong boardroom, traveling businessman Pierre is unable to close a deal with a gaggle of Chinese suits, being too visibly distracted by the strikingly beautiful (and oh-so-professional) translator on duty. That would be Mathilde (Marie-Josee Croze, “Tell No One”), a much younger French expat who initiates a dalliance with Pierre that will span many years and time zones, the two lovers stealing a few days or even hours together whenever their jet-setting ways bring them together.



Adapted by Breitman and Agnes de Sacy from a novel by Anna Gavalda (whose “Ensemble, c’est tout” inspired the 2007 Gallic hit “Hunting and Gathering”), the scenario has its share of gaps and simplifications, as well as a certain temporal vagueness. Completely in thrall to Mathilde and increasingly alienated from his wife and children in Paris, the weak-willed Pierre can be a maddeningly passive protag; it’s never made clear exactly what Mathilde sees in her pudgy paramour, pushing this May-December romance in the direction of male fantasy. The only problem Pierre and Mathilde ever seem to have is the problem of not being able to spend more time together.



Chloe’s p.o.v., though crucial to the book’s dual focus, here feels like little more than a distracting framing device (in part due to Loiret-Caille’s sniveling perf). And while Christiane Millet packs anger and pathos aplenty into her one big scene as Pierre’s wronged wife, her role only further stacks the dramatic deck in Mathilde’s favor.



But whatever problems exist at the script level, they are mostly overcome by the tender, moving rapport of Auteuil and Croze, and even moreso by the sheer eye-candy luster of the film’s direction. In her third feature (after “Beautiful Memories” and “The Man of My Life”), Breitman rightly can be accused of painting the most glamorous portrait of transglobal infidelity imaginable, distinguished by Michel Amathieu’s crystalline lensing, Marie-Laure Lasson’s gorgeous costumes (which Croze doffs on more than one occasion), a succession of five-star hotel rooms and a superb eye for Hong Kong’s sexiest locations.



Breitman isn’t afraid to use a few artful flourishes to blur the lines between past and present or heighten the melodrama of the moment; she’s fond of letting cigarette smoke hang suggestively in the air, or adding a delicate layer of soft focus around the edges of the frame.