Innocent without guilt – Weekend – Kommersant
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Less than a year has passed since the Russian premiere of Novy Mir, and on the screens is another film by Louis Garrel, Under the Rules and Without, a sad comedy about the obvious meanings of life, perhaps the first truly successful directorial experience of your favorite actor.
“With Rules and Without” (for some reason, Russian distributors were not satisfied with the original title of the film “L’innocent” – “Innocent”), according to the already established tradition, was shown out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, although this film was quite worthy of a prestigious program “Directors’ Fortnight” or cinephile’s “Week of Criticism”. Garrel is here, as usual, both in the frame and in the co-authors of the script, and he dies of love, and philosophizes about the impossibility of it. But there are several significant differences between the typical role of an artist who has grown up in a cinema hall, whom we have already seen so many times flitting around the 6th arrondissement of Paris in search of either a woman or a successful replica, and a new role – Abel’s guide in the Lyon Aquarium, a disconsolate widower and a devoted son. In front of the spectator, who has been waiting for changes, he is finally a completely adult person with a wandering smile and eternal pain in his eyes, who has reached the point in his work when the tricky questions that life throws up are no longer enough quotes from Godard or Truffaut as an answer.
Abel is in his late thirties, his wife died in a tragic accident in a car accident, her best friend Clemence (Noemie Merlane), going on tinder dates, from time to time listens to his complaints about fate, not noticing that these complaints are more like the pleas of a lover men are about reciprocity. Abel’s eccentric mother Sylvie (Anouk Greenberg) runs a drama club at the local prison and is regularly charmed by her charges. One of them, Michel (Roshdi Zem), having freed himself, immediately becomes her husband, naturally causing the newly-made stepson to fear that he will not drag Sylvie into his dirty deeds. For the flower shop that Michel decided to open with Sylvie is clearly a cover for some suspicious fraud. And the dull provincial life that flows on the banks of the troubled Rhone only strengthens Abel in a sense of hopelessness – the world consists of rogues and lunatics, the former use the latter, and characters like Abel, out of rank, have no choice but to humbly observe, agreeing, such way, with the role of an accomplice.
By the Rules and Without is filmed as a crime comedy, based on the assumption that almost everything that happens is a passing joke. Garrel gladly delves into formalism, winking at the viewer: here is an homage to the “Thomas Crown Affair”, and here is a nod to the imperishable Jose Giovanni “Two in the City”. But behind all these reconstructions of the former cultural greatness lies a serious, extremely frank statement of a person tired of clowning around.
Over the past half century, cinema has addressed countless times the theme of the little man’s rebellion against the system, no matter what exactly was meant by the order of things that the protagonist dared to destroy – the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, or political lies, or violence as the engine of social apocalypse. Most often, the hero was a white, as they say now, a cisgender man who suffered from global circumstances – a lost war or a class struggle – one fine morning or dark night, he took up arms to declare: I’ve had enough!
Travis Bickle, William Foster and now Abel with the exhaustive surname Lefranc is a Frenchman who is ready to speak out with a directness unusual for the national mentality about the most important thing: personal happiness cannot be built without sacrifice in the name of society. Let the society here be the inner circle, family, friends, like-minded people, adored dog. The innocent Abel sacrifices himself in order to atone for the stupidity and vulgarity of others, so that their dreams, even if they are completely insignificant, come true. And then all these pompous diatribes from film to film, the legacy of a long-choked new wave – how to live? why live? – will acquire meaning, from chatter they will turn into conversations about really important things. It is worth living only for the sake of others – no one is to blame, but the one who believes otherwise is guilty.
At the box office from March 9
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