Dir: Guillaume Nicloux | France Thriller 111’
Guillaume Nicloux’s A Private Affair (Une affaire privée) is a stylishly jagged French film noir, with the director giving the familiar private-eye genre a distinctly offbeat spin.
Thierry Lhermitte is first class in a strikingly downbeat role as François Manéri, a chain-smoking, world-weary detective investigating the disappearance of a young woman, while the film surrounds him with a stunningly starry cast: Marion Cotillard, Samuel Le Bihan, Aurore Clément, Jeanne Balibar, Clovis Cornillac, Niels Arestrup, Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Bruno Todeschini all make memorable appearances.
Nicloux keeps the investigation punching forward with snappy editing and a brisk, sometimes deliberately disorienting pace. The look is suitably gritty and unglamorous, plunging Manéri into a shadowy, nocturnal Paris of bars, apartments and dubious encounters. It has the texture of classic film noir without becoming a slavish imitation.
There’s also an amusing, slightly anarchic feel to the whole enterprise. Nicloux clearly enjoys populating his mystery with eccentric characters and allowing the darkness to rub up against a vein of dry humour. Even the supporting players seem to be having fun with the genre’s conventions.
And what a supporting cast it is. Cotillard, still early in her career, brings an intriguing ambiguity to Clarisse, while Aurore Clément, Jeanne Balibar, Niels Arestrup and Samuel Le Bihan give the investigation an increasingly colourful and unsettling human landscape.
With its punchy editing, grubby visual atmosphere, lively pacing and gallery of terrific French actors, A Private Affair is an engagingly idiosyncratic take on the private-detective thriller — tough-edged, amusing and never quite predictable.
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