A flame will flare up from the caviar – Newspaper Kommersant No. 40 (7485) of 03/10/2023

The second film of the year by Louis Garrel, the charming crime comedy L’Innocent, was released. Like Garrel’s previous work This New World (2022), it is based on a screenplay (apparently unfinished) by the great surrealist Jean-Claude Career. At Mikhail Trofimenkov the film also evoked unexpected domestic associations.

Whatever you say, the surrealists were some kind of special people, capable of overcoming death itself in their dream flight. Career (1931-2021), screenwriter of six of Luis Buñuel’s late masterpieces – from “The Diary of a Maid” (1964) to “This Vague Object of Desire” (1977) – has been dead for more than two years. But for the second year in a row, Louis Garrel releases films based on the scripts of the late master. Either he left him a magical chest with manuscripts as a legacy, or Garrel has a mystical connection with that area of ​​\u200b\u200bheaven where old modernist hooligans go after death.

In the delightfully politically incorrect dystopia This New World, Quarry and Garrel ruthlessly tread through all the phobias and philias of modern society. From the cult – a la Greta Thunberg – of children whose mouth speaks the truth and whose humanism imperceptibly takes on Nazi shades, to covid panic: the film dealt with the poisoning of the planet’s air with “ultra-fine particles”, but what’s the difference. “By Rules and Without” – a film originally called “Innocent” or “Innocent” – appeals to the traditions of “polar”, as the national version of noir is called in France: Career knew a lot about genre cinema, and not just phantasmagoria.

The film evoked a bizarre association with Yefim Gamburg’s classic Soviet cartoon The Robbery by… (1978). Thus, where brilliant parodic formulas of national versions of cinema about ideal robberies were given. The French novel featured characters similar to Jean Gabin, Alain Delon and the conditional Brigitte Bardot, who brilliantly, but in the end, as usual, absurdly unsuccessfully robbed a bank. There, even the most dangerous missions were performed by a drunken mouse, tamed by a conditional Gabin in prison.

Crime charismatics like Gabin or Lino Ventura are no longer produced in French culture. No problem. The Moroccan Roshdi Zem does an excellent job with the role of the brutal romantic authority Michel. His junior partner in a sensational robbery is, what to do, not Alain Delon, but a guide from the Lyon Aquarium Abel (Louis Garrel). The eternally reflective intellectual, and this is the constant role of an actor-director, suddenly crosses the other side of the law out of boyish excitement, out of a desire to feel like someone more than a mourner for a dead wife and a guardian of an unlucky mother.

The fact is that his mother Sylvie (Anouk Greenberg), a retired actress who runs a theater club in a maximum security prison, has acquired an unpleasant habit of marrying her wards. Michelle is already her third chosen one. But, according to Abel, the most dangerous. Let’s say how miraculously he and Sylvie literally fell on their heads a gift from heaven in the form of a flower shop, supposedly provided by an old sidekick out of kindness.

Having rightly explained that the flower trade is nothing more than a “roof” for some major “case”, Abel begins to follow Michel with comically inventive frenzy. What only sincerely makes laugh not only the audience, but also the hardened convict, who calculates the surveillance for one-two-three and involves the “stepson” in one of the main roles in the planned robbery.

Robbery these days, however, is no longer banks. Banknotes seem to have lost their value. Among the few things worthy of risking freedom and life for them is black caviar of Iranian production. Her cargo is exactly what Michelle and her comrades should steal with the decisive help of Abel and the girlfriend of his late wife Clemence (Noémie Merlan).

The plan of the robbery is worthy of both Career’s talent and the best examples of crime classics. Abel and Clemence must act as cover for the raiders, chamber, but deadly convincing mini-performance, depicting the quarreling spouses.

Michel turns out to be a director head and shoulders above any professional like Sylvie, training accomplices. A good bandit is simply obliged to be an excellent actor: the craft involves a sophisticated manipulation of human psychology.

But either due to professional manipulativeness, or by chance, Michelle awakens in the shy Abel and Clemence, wandering around the tinder hookups, feelings that they really feel for each other, but which they are afraid to admit. The performance they put on is both hilarious and touching. In the flow of theatrical play into the authenticity of feelings and back, the hand of Career is felt most strongly. But this climactic episode seems somehow flattened, sandwiched between too long an introduction and too fast-paced denouement.

Well, it remains to bet whether Garrel has exhausted the treasures from the Quarry chest, or in less than a year we will receive a new message from the dead surrealist.