Writer-director-star Louis Garrel’s aim in making The Innocent was to “make a movie full of charm”, and he has created a joyful homage to the crime capers of the French New Wave: an era which he loves, and to which he has a strong personal connection. The son of New Wave filmmaker Phillipe Garrel, his godfather is actor Jean-Pierre Leaud (who played Francois Truffaut’s alter ego, Antoine Donel), and he portrayed Jean Luc Godard in the 2017 biopic Le Redoubtable.
In co-writing this story of thirty-something widower Abel, whose mother’s marriage to a prisoner sets off an intricate and highly enjoyable train of events, Garrel drew on his relationship with his own mother, actor and filmmaker Brigitte Sy. He has described the film as “very personal, a small portrait of my mother” (Pedro Almodovar approvingly told him “it’s always good to write a movie about your mother”). Sy worked for a time in a prison and, to Garrel’s consternation, married a prisoner when Garrel was 17 – a story she herself drew on in her 2010 drama Les Mains Libres.
The central location for most of the pioneering films of the French New Wave was Paris, but, taking the view that this has become a very familiar film setting, Garrel sets The Innocent in Lyon, with both exterior scenes and deliberately non-naturalistic interiors beautifully shot. Garrel is supported by an able cast, including as his new stepfather actor/director Roschdy Zem (whose 2006 film Omar Killed Me was Morocco’s submission to the Academy Awards); and as Girl Friday Clemence, rising star Noemie Merlant (star of previous WFC screenings Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Paris, 13th District).
“Cinematographer Julien Poupard shoots Lyon as a shadowy metropolis, all lamp-lit empty cobbled streets and Edward Hopper cafes. … There’s a great pleasure in seeing actors of this calibre wield their talents with such fleetness of foot.” Catherine Wheatley, Sight & Sound.
“Smooth-talking screwball antics that will probably be remade any day now with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.” Kevin Maher, The Times.
