Obviously, Arnaud Desplechin is a fan of extreme sports.
Already, adapting Philip Roth is a challenge.
Tackling his most twisted novel is a puzzle.
The director gets away with the honors of war.
However, we are far from Truffaut, whom Desplechin idolizes.
Deception
was almost entirely composed of dialogue and earned its author to accelerate his divorce from Claire Bloom.
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The hero is called Philip. He's a writer. Well. This American moved to London. Regularly, in the studio which serves as his office, he finds his mistress, also married. There is a steamy love scene. The rest of the time, they talk. The subjects are varied, adultery, women, the anti-Semitism of the English. This Philip is in his element. Language is his domain, his playground. Opposite, his companion stands up to him. She is never short of arguments. Manuscripts pile up on the table. The shelves are lined with volumes. The windows overlook a garden. The filmmaker sometimes slightly changes the scenery. The walls are suddenly not the same. Lying on the ground, the protagonists continue to discuss.
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The ensemble, quite virtuoso, is constructed in twelve chapters.
There is something literary, theatrical, in these verbal jousts, these double-edged sentences.
At one point, the man rehabilitates the deliciously old-fashioned word “gisquette” (in the book, we said “minette”).
The lovers giggle.
Their exchanges denote a boundless bond.
Between them, lying is out of season.
It's about jealousy, exile, creation, a Schubert record.
Do not forget this trial for misogyny which turns into a farce and which resonates like a firecracker in a vaudeville.
The camera tracks faces up close.
Winding like a boa
Denis Podalydès metamorphoses into a seductive manipulator, becomes a double of the real Roth.
He succeeded in this feat with silences, half-smiles, equivocal looks.
He is devious, with an Olympian calm, sinuous like a boa constrictor.
Nothing surprises him.
Nothing can resist him.
Reality, he makes short work of it.
All he has to do is put it in his notebooks, and voila.
Then come back into the conversation a Czech student who needs a visa, another who has suffered electroshock and with whom he has lunch in a Chinese restaurant, a director from the East (we are in 1987) with a volcanic temperament. .
These paper beings suddenly take shape on the screen.
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Emmanuelle Devos awaits the results of her biopsy in a New York hospital bed.
Léa Seydoux takes the lion's share.
She is teasing, with an unusual sensuality.
Their connection was interrupted one day, like all connections.
He liked her voice.
We understand it.
When the legitimate wife (Anouk Grinberg, absolutely correct) falls on the notebook filled with notes, the earth slips under her feet.
Who are all these women, eh?
No matter how hard he struggles, swears his great gods, the damage is done.
“I can't fuck with words,” he
says in ultimate defense.
Outside, the snow is falling, like at the end of
People from Dublin
.
There was a book.
There is now the film.
Roth-Desplechin: everywhere.
