The Big Picture

A French film whose original title was "L'homme qui voulait vivre sa vie" or "The man who wanted to live his life", which while a bit clunking in English, is a better and less trite title than the one they've come up with.

So... Paul Exben is by any reasonable standard, apparently a very successful man. He's a successful lawyer, has a beautiful wife, lovely kids, lovely house, everything is just about perfect. However, not all is as it seems. He's a lawyer because he was pressured into giving up his dreams of being what he wants to be really, a photographer. And he's supposedly a great photographer, but traded all that in for the big money, and fills his house with all the fancy photographic kit money can buy to compensate. His wife (in what seems to be an unreasonable double standard) seems to resent him for a) having gone out to be a bread winner so she can concentrate on her writing, where she feels like a trapped failure and wants to give up on her artistic ambitions, and b) having given up on his own artistic ambitions. So much so that she's conducting an affair with a guy who's basically what Paul would have been if he hadn't sold out, a struggling photographer.

The domestic drama comes to a sudden end, when there's a bit of a calamity. Without saying what, Paul is suddenly in a position where he looks guilty of a very serious crime, and decides he has to cover his tracks and disappear completely. Which he does, disappearing off to somewhere in the former Yugoslavia (Montenegro, I think, but details are sketchy), where he begins a new life with a new identity, and begins to live the life he always wanted really, as a professional photographer, a life which comes to have meteoric success, which threatens to put him under the light of publicity, and expose his identity.

It's a great film. Romain Duris puts in a great performance as Paul, whose calm, self assured exterior gradually unravels as the film goes on; there's never a visible jarring change of character, yet by the end, Paul is quite a different man than he was at the start. The film's beautifully shot, lots of lovely vistas of the Adriatic coastline, which links well with the films theme of artistic photography (though at one point, I did find myself thinking that the cinematographer was clearly much better at framing a shot than Paul himself.) And ultimately, it's one of those films that makes you reflect on your own life, and what it would take to knock you out of your rut; there's times when you think maybe Paul is overreacting, whether he even needs to run, or whether had it all been left to come out he'd have been exonerated. But then you realise, he *wants* to run. And that made me at least reflect on what might be needed to jar me out of a safe existence, and if I had to run, where I would go, and how I would live. And if a film can inspire that kind of navel-gazing introspection, it's clearly got a lot going for it.