Whatever You Say (2002)

Having more or less proved himself as an actor Guillaume Canet tried his hand at Writing and Directing and the result is fairly respectable so that anyone seeing this in 2002 may well have predicted a solid future for Guillaume behind the camera and would have been proved right when Ne le dis a personne won him a Best Director Cesar (plus a Best Actor for Francois Cluzet) last year.It's never easy to blur genres - Billy Wilder did it brilliantly in The Apartment but how many Billy Wilders are there out there? That's right, you can count them on the fingers of one thumb - and segue from Satire to Manipulation to Violence but on the whole Canet manages to pull it off more or less successfully. He seems to have a knack for picking solid leading men (witness Cluzet in Ne le dis a personne) and in Francois Berleand he found the ideal actor to personify corruption. Berleand has a long history - some 166 titles - of supporting the finest French actors with a recent foray into leading man status and here he provides the industrial-strength cement that holds the film together. It's nearly always a bad idea for a director to cast his wife in a film at all let alone a leading role and when the wife in question (they divorced last year) is Diane Kruger it is more Disaster than bad idea but Canet himself plays perfectly against Berleand and if he just misses some of his targets they are not the Satirical ones of television Game Shows. On balance a fine effort.

I saw Bastien's arc of him turning against Mr. Broustal coming. In the end, he is a tragic character, likewise for Broustal's woman. What I didn't see coming where the hilarious and suspenseful complications in the plot as that arc would start to materialize. Nice closing animated sequence - symbolic and lets us decide the meaning after Broustal lectures Bastien on what POWER really is. Oh, so the tape did get him it would seem. A dark comedy filled with innuendos, not for those who are easily offended. Want to touch? says the lady when they are getting a tan.8/10

Guillaume Canet is a talented (I think... I actually didn't see a lot of movies where he stared) youg actor who decided to write and direct his own movie : "mon idole" (my idol). The result is a quite good little movie where the audience is never exactly sure of what will come next. Watching this I thought of movies such as Claude Chabrol's (like his "inspecteur lavardin" serie) but also some from Jean-Pierre Mocky. The main character is under pressure and so are we, there is definitly something here. Only lacks the moments when Broustal (the boss) could be seducing, could justify to be... an idol. The cast is great.

Great movie, and funny too. François Berléand's performance is unique. For an hour and a half you don't know how it's going to end. And when you think you know what's next, you're wrong.