The Innocent is the kind of breezy good time that's hard to find at the movies these days. It's not devoid of deeper meaning, but it's brimming, first and foremost, with a relish for storytelling that's playful and fun.
Directed and co-written by Louis Garrel, who also casts himself as the lead, the plot is like a degustation, with twists and unexpected symmetries, tonal shifts and careful pacing.
It straddles different genres — family drama, heist movie, screwball comedy – and makes a virtue of these slightly uncertain foundations by switching registers as it progresses, sometimes within the same scene.
Set in Lyon, it centres on Abel (Garrel), a depressed, 30-something widower who becomes anxious when his mother Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg), a drama teacher who works in prisons, marries one of her pupils, Michel.
This ex-con (played by Roschdy Zem with a gravelly charm that undermines expectations) is soon out of jail and helping her plan a new venture – a florist shop in the centre of town.
But Abel is not convinced of his new stepfather's bona fides, and teams up with best friend Clémence (a delightful Noémie Merlant, most recently seen in Todd Field's Tár) to tail Michel around town. They discover he's been meeting with some underworld buddies.
So far so predictable, you might think.
But the film works to wrong-foot audiences who might sit in judgement of Michel, turning the tables on any easy moral assumptions by implicating Abel and Clémence as unlikely accomplices in Michel's shady new venture.
Garrel, who is best known outside of France as an actor (with more than 40 credits to his name, including Greta Gerwig's Little Women), started out as a child in his father Philippe's 1989 experimental drama Les Baisers de secours, before garnering mainstream attention in Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 French New Wave tribute, The Dreamers.
He's developed a reputation as a tall, dark and hunky lead, but this would be an oversimplification of his screen presence. He possesses a haunted quality that can sometimes read as awkwardness, and in roles that straddle drama and comedy, such as this one, he can be very funny.
As a director of four features to date, his sensibilities are certainly more populist than those of his father, who remains one of France's most acclaimed directors.
The Innocent feels like a Hollywood film shot through a Gallic indie lens, and recalls a certain type of cinematic detective story where the city becomes a vivid backdrop to an obsessive sleuth — think Hitchcock's San Francisco-set Vertigo or Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery.
Garrel frames Lyon as an autumnal and mist-covered city, divided between an old centre where stone buildings crowd narrow streets, and a spartan, semirural periphery of barren fields and modern truck stops.
These two contrasting urban textures evoke the divide between the bohemian boomer milieu of Abel's mother, and the working-class fringes of town where Michel and his mates are planning their next job.
It's a juxtaposition that echoes the class and cultural divides of contemporary France, but the film falls short of making any simplistic statement about sociopolitical or ethnic fault lines.
Again and again, it displays a capacity for complexity. Characters who appear dubious later receive a sympathetic hearing, while those who seem incapable of certain transgressions transform before our eyes.
Garrel drew inspiration for the film partly from his mother, the actor and filmmaker Brigitte Sy, who also taught drama in prisons and fell in love with one of the inmates, and made a film about it in 2010, called Free Hands.
In conceiving a fictional version of his mother on screen, he has spoken about his admiration for her idealism, and her attachment to notions of truth and honesty.
It's not surprising that The Innocent, then, is a film in which lying is the greatest betrayal.
It places acting – and actors – in a particularly ambiguous moral light.
The film opens in one of Sylvie's drama classes, where Michel is delivering some hard-boiled dialogue that we only later realise is part of an acting exercise. He's very good in this line reading; he's the kind of man we imagine a criminal to be, and not the caring, compassionate man he actually is.
This cinematic trompe-l'œil lays the foundation for the film's thematic focus, where the idea of acting becomes a metaphor for the way people present masks to each other, or for the way it enables them to say truths they normally wouldn't dare express.
When this motif returns midway through the film, Abel and Clémence are at a tipping point in their relationship. Without spoiling the film's climax, both of them find themselves signing up to play characters in an elaborate ruse that's part of a complex heist.
It culminates in a very funny and suspenseful sequence, where they play a couple having a quarrel in a public place, and we, the audience, see the chemistry between them.
Merlant, who recently played Lydia Tár's brooding assistant and before that, a lead in Céline Sciamma's 2019 queer period romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire, is almost unrecognisable here as a happy-go-lucky character who's an emotionally centred foil to Garrel's depressed antihero. She won best supporting actress at the Césars (the French equivalent of the Academy Awards) for the role (and the film won best original screenplay).
It's thanks to her that The Innocent finally finds its true target — not as a caper movie per se, but as a touching and funny film about love and the lengths we sometimes have to go to find it.
The Innocent is in cinemas now.
