Cinemadefrance.com

 

Marion Cotillard and François Cluzet head a terrific cast in this acerbic group portrait of the Parisian bourgeoisie on holiday, from Tell No One director Guillaume Canet.
Actor Guillaume Canet proved his directing chops and commercial nous with the massively successful thriller Tell No One. There are elements of thriller tension in Little White Lies – not to mention a dazzlingly confident long-take opening shot – but this is an altogether different film, an ensemble drama about a group of long-term friends who get together for a holiday and end up confronting their personal truths and traumas. While Ludo (Jean Dujardin), the biggest bon vivant in the crowd, faces a crisis of his own, the friends head off for their annual holiday at the seaside house of Max (François Cluzet), a successful but hyper-stressed restauranteur. Inevitably, the friends soon come to terms with their own secrets, anxieties and desires, with Max in particular heading for meltdown after being rattled by an intimate confession from his closest friend (Benoît Magimel). Leisurely, classily made and showcasing some fine acting – especially from Cluzet and Marion Cotillard, in a these-days rare French role – Little White Lies is an elegant, entertaining and sometimes engagingly brash variation on the usually more muted genre of the bourgeois lifestyle drama.

With: François Cluzet, Marion Cotillard, Benoît Magimel, Gilles Lellouche, Jean Dujardin, Laurent Lafitte, Valérie Bonneton, Anne Marivin, Louise Monot, Joël Dupuch, Hocine Merabet, Maxim Nucci, Matthieu Chedid, Pierre-Benoist Varoclier

Trailer for the film Les petits mouchoirs: