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Mark Llobrera

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Cover art forThe Innocent

The Innocent

Year
2022
Watched
May 25, 2023
Rewatch?
No

Enjoyable! I love a small-scale heist comedy where the heist stakes are low, but the interpersonal stakes are very high. I wasn’t sure if things would take a dark turn late in the movie but it mostly stays light without tipping over into outright farce.

Roschdy Zem and Anouk Grinberg easily sell Michel and Sylvie’s unlikely relationship. Garrel is perhaps the weakest of the four leads, but maybe that’s because his character is supposed to be so emotionally numb. He does bring a lot of humor to Abel’s bumbling investigations of Michel. He’s like the worst P.I. ever. Noémi Merlant, though—she runs away with the back half of the film. She’s always a magnetic presence on screen.

(TIL Louis Garrel is the very definition of French film nepo baby, and that he co-signed a letter of support for Roman Polanski about a decade ago along with other French film directors. It dampened my enthusiasm for this film a bit.)