Rose lives in a disused hotel with her three children \u2014 temporarily, or so she says. There’s no money, but she meets every difficulty with the same disarming cheer and a healthy dose of self-deception. Jean is in his thirties, lives alone, and has deliberately shut the outside world out. The two meet under the strangest possible circumstances, and something between them starts to work: against his will, Jean gets drawn into Rose’s schemes and grows fond of her three teenagers. As they gradually assemble into something like a family, it becomes clear how much is cracking underneath Rose’s good humour.<\/p>\n
For L\u00e9onetti this is a sharp turn. His first film, Carr\u00e9 blanc (2011), was a cold dystopia; Return to Sender (2015) was an American thriller starring Rosamund Pike. This one wears almost no genre armour at all: a human-scale story observed at close range, which he also wrote. David Nissen shot it, and the score is by Fred Avril and \u2014 unusually \u2014 by Pierre Lottin, who plays the lead.<\/p>\n
Sandrine Kiberlain plays Rose and Pierre Lottin plays Jean, best known here from the Les Tuche films, The Marching Band and Ozon’s The Stranger, for which he won the C\u00e9sar for Best Supporting Actor. The three children are played by Louise Lab\u00e8que, Alexis Rosenstiehl and Alma Ngoc.<\/p>\n
French critics were divided: the average across nineteen outlets sits mid-range, and several reviewers found the story’s frame predictable and the ending manipulative. What almost everyone agreed on were the two leads \u2014 La Voix du Nord called them “one of the most cheering mismatched duos we’ve seen on screen in a long time,” and T\u00e9l\u00e9rama described the film as “a successful comedy with an unexpected outcome.”<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rose lives in a disused hotel with her three children \u2014 temporarily, or so she says. There’s no money, but she meets every difficulty with the same disarming cheer and a healthy dose of self-deception. Jean is in his thirties, lives alone, and has deliberately shut the outside world out. The two meet under the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":35053,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n