But Depardieu is great as Alain, the ageing singer who has a strong local following, and plays in clubs and dance-halls to the over-40s single/divorcee crowd who need his sentimental tunes, even more than booze, to help break the ice. Alain also plays retirement homes, crooningly passing among the audience and gently stroking the cheeks of beaming old ladies, his CDs laid out on a trestle-table for purchase. (These scenes, melancholy yet not nastily satiric, are in fact very different from those in Fabrice du Welz's 2004 horror-comedy Calvaire, in which Laurent Lucas's singer, as he plays his tragic gigs at old-folks' homes, is obviously heading for a terrible reckoning.
) Alain is reasonably content with his lot, and his still healthy career is being shrewdly managed by his former wife Mich le (Christine Citti) with whom relations are perfectly amicable. But then he spots a beautiful young woman, Marion (C cile de France), in the audience; he rolls out his roguish charm on her and she, in spite of herself, is flattered and intrigued. Their relationship unfolds from there, bittersweet and painful on both sides, when she, being by trade an estate agent, warily agrees to help him look for a new house.
As they glumly consider the various properties Alain may or may not be interested in acquiring, these become metaphors for all his possible futures - and hers too. Where does he want to live? How does he want to live?
Does this faltering infatuation mean Alain actually has a new future, which now needs to be imagined? For Marion, however, a real love affair with this exotic and faintly absurd older man would mean the opposite. Options would be closed off: for good or ill.
She would have no future in that sense, but she might have security and, with a child to look after, that is not to be turned down lightly. Later, the incorrigible Alain hits on another sexy young woman and she brutally turns him down: "I'm not going to settle for a guy like you." Alain is not what Marion imagined for herself, but should she settle for him?
And should Alain gamble on the unsettling experience of seriously falling in love? The movie is quietly, and understatedly, about their respective dilemmas. A gentle, autumnal film, with nice performances from Depardieu and De France.
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