11/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: With Guillaume Canet and Alba Rohrwacher in tow as romancers, French filmmaker Stéphane Brizé finds a new creative tool: his funny bone

Perhaps one of the least sympathetic themes for a piece of cinema is the absolute pain and discomfort of being a recognisable celebrity; saying that, occasional films, often made when their creator has experienced a first flush of fame, have a degree of insight. One could hazard a guess that having to pose for innumerable selfies, if well-wishers spot you on a day out in public, can’t be wonderful. Yet French filmmaker Stéphane Brizé, this time in a rare comic mood with Out of Season [+see also:
trailer
interview: Stéphane Brizé
film profile], finds a kind of romantic good fortune, as an errant selfie, with a location tag, taken with his lead Mathieu (Guillaume Canet, as a Guillaume Canet-like, dreamboat actor), has clearly found its way from the Instagram recommended page towards the gaze of his long-lost love, Alice (Alba Rohrwacher).

Brizé, premiering a film for the third time in Venice’s main competition, is associated in international viewers’ minds with stark, probing dramas of labour, or a man’s (often the great Vincent Lindon) struggle amidst said labour. But whilst he doesn’t necessarily excel with this more placid, pliant and accessible film, collaborating for the first time with French studio Gaumont, he comes up with an ingratiating, amiable diversion on the subject of love and its discontents, old-fashioned both pleasingly and staidly.

Mathieu, an elite French movie star, has done a runner from the upmarket pièce de théâtre that he was rehearsing in Paris. With his director and acting colleagues furious, and causing his WhatsApp notifications to go haywire, he alights on a luxury spa hotel in coastal western France, initially aiming to do nada, until that performing itch strikes him again, and he’s reading a fat printed-out movie script with adorable little glasses on.

Hotel guests and town passers-by recognise him: he’s not that grumpy, and in a film where the comedy and romance are sequential and isolated, rather than merged (as a true “romcom” might be), Brizé gets some fun out of gentle Tati-esque gags involving a silver-toned ergonomic coffee machine that won’t stop humming, and an automatic closet door whose slow, motorised closing definitely contributes to the film’s two-hour running time.

He’s happily married in a bit of a “power couple”, to a famous Parisian TV news anchor, but as Alice, a piano teacher and the former love of his life, who coincidentally lives nearby, gets in touch, the film tiptoes into more of an In the Mood for Love, mid-life unrequited passion register. My, do they look cute together, Canet and Rohrwacher (whose understated performance style and carefully modulated expressions really elevate the affair), not unlike, say George Clooney and Meryl Streep if they were both in their forties, and in a Nancy Meyers-directed star vehicle, which this also happily resembles.

Whilst the two of them are able to reignite their intimacy and connection, there is a sting in the tale, as they each recognise this affair’s transience, and that it’s a belated last goodbye, rather than something they’ll pursue in secret amidst their long-running marriages. Out of Season is a very pleasant time, and it’s warming to see the intelligence Brizé brings to his depiction of social media and our digital second lives, in the same manner he understood the fear of video surveillance in the work environment in The Measure of a Man [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Stéphane Brizé
film profile], but it needs something rawer, more Cassavetes-like, to get further under our skin – a bit more fog in the off-season breeze.

Out of Season is a French production, staged and also sold internationally by Gaumont. France 2 Cinéma is also on board as a producer.