A Faithful Man

A Faithful Man

L'homme fidèle
Directed by Louis Garrel
France | 2018 | Narrative
75 minutes | French

Nine years after she left him for his best friend, journalist Abel (Louis Garrel) gets back together with Marianne (Laetitia Casta), his recently widowed old flame. It seems to be a beautiful new beginning, but soon the hapless Abel finds himself embroiled in all sorts of drama: the come-ons of a wily young woman (Lily-Rose Depp), the machinations of Marianne’s morbid young son (Joseph Engel), and some unsavory questions about what exactly happened to his girlfriend’s first husband. Shifting points of view as nimbly as its players switch partners, the sophomore feature from actor/director Louis Garrel — co-written with the legendary Jean-Claude Carrière, the longtime Luis Buñuel collaborator — is at once a beguiling bedroom farce and a playful inversion of the patriarchal tropes of the French New Wave. The LA Times calls the film “a tart, seriocomic morsel of desire and doubt.”