What a tangled web we weave when we decide to allow the spiders of secrecy to spin their sticky entrapments.
Harried to potential cardiac arrest candidate, tax inspector Marc, misses his train back to Paris after working a case in Valence, near Lyon. In a café, he has a chance encounter with Sylvie, who has come in for a pack of cigarettes. They bond over nicotine and agree to an assignation in Paris later in the week.
Sylvie makes the rendezvous but Marc is caught up at the office over an excruciating tax matter concerning a couple of naïve Chinese businessmen with no French language skills.
An acute anxiety attack causes further delay and Sylvie, feeling she has been stood up, returns to her husband, who has received an American posting, and both decamp for the United States.
A week while later, Marc finds himself in Valence again, and this time strikes a rapport that segues into romance with Sophie, who, unbeknownst to Marc, is Sylvie’s sister.
It is only when Marc and Sophie become engaged that Marc twigs the situation and for some reason cannot bring himself to confess the situation.
Tension mounts as the wedding day looms and Sylvie’s arrival is imminent.
The main attraction of this film is the casting and performances of the three female leads.
Sylvie is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, Sophie by Chiara Mastroianni, and their mother, Madame Berger, by Catherine Deneuve, Mastroianni’s mother in real life.
Benoit Poelvoorde plays the wired too tight Marc, to whom sleeping dogs appear to be an anathema.
In spite of a doting wife and adorable daughter, Marc is fixated on what could have been had he kept the rendezvous with Sylvie. At the same time he is pursuing the local mayor for tax anomalies, a trifling affair that seems imprudent to those close to him, and impudent to the town official, who, ironically, presided over his marriage.
It is as though Marc bears a grudge for officiating at his wedding, as if he were to blame for his predicament.
Marc is an infuriatingly frustrating character, terribly flawed and fallible, and thus unerringly human.
The Alliance Francaise French Film Festival runs March 3 – 22 at the Chauvel, Paddington,, Palace Verona, Paddington, Palace Norton Street, Leichardt, and Hayden Orpheum Cremorne.