Trying To Have it Both Ways: Guillaume Canet’s Little White Lies (Les Petits Mouchoirs)

Guillaume Canet’s 2006 French thriller Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne), which was released in North America in 2008, was, hands down, the best suspense film I’d seen in years. Based on American Harlan Coben’s novel of the same name, it was a superb movie with an absolutely enticing story of a doctor (Francois Cluzet) who one day receives an e-mail from his wife, whom he thought had died eight years earlier. That’s only the beginning of a pulse pounding and highly complex tale that saw said doctor running for his life, suspected of murder and convinced that his beloved was still alive. Utterly logical – most thrillers falter in that regard – and perfectly plotted, it announced Canet, an actor who had only directed one feature before, Mon idole (My Idol, 2002), as a genuine talent to watch.

Understandably, I awaited Canet’s follow-up film with bated breath. After receiving its world premiere at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival, Les petits mouchoirs (Little White Lies) has finally opened commercially. Alas, it’s a mostly disappointing and weak effort, albeit not without some virtues of its own. Little White Lies, which Canet wrote and directed, is being compared to The Big Chill. That's likely because its soundtrack, laid on with ‘60s American rock hits from the likes of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Gladys Knight and The Isley Brothers, and its premise, as a group of friends deal with an accident that has befallen one of their circle, is similar to that American movie. But truth be told, it never truly reminded me of that film. Little White Lies feels like a typical contemporary French drama that,  towards its conclusion, echoes the banalities and dishonesty of so much Hollywood fare.

A Guilty Pleasure Without the Pleasure: Fair Play

Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor in Fair Play.

There’s nothing wrong with the kind of movie Fair Play purports to be, but there’s everything wrong with what it is. Written and directed by Chloe Domont, this thriller (which premiered at Sundance last January) came up in the media feed as a Netflix attention-getter, “guilty pleasure,” “nail-biter.” A few clicks revealed decent notices, one or two from critics who are not completely negligible, and the synopsis – two Manhattan stockbrokers, lovers and coworkers, enter into an escalating war of wills – sounded okay. Most of us are game occasionally for something flashy, sexy, dopey. Lifetime Network used to have an assembly line devoted to movies about trusting, open-hearted women terrorized by charming, hunky psychopaths; like any type of genre movie, they were enjoyable if you didn’t expect or need them to be other than what they were. Each new plot was a chewed-over regurgitation of the last, with every shift from romance to red flag, sex to psychosis blatantly telegraphed. Yet they were made cleanly and proficiently, without pretense of depth, but with the right degree of actorly exertion. They were televisual junk food of the kind abjured by only the most ascetic or snobbish of consumers, and Netflix has stepped into the breach: any time of year you can stream something on the order of Deadly Illusions, Dangerous Lies, or Secret Obsession.