Marion Cotillard excels in Canet’s Little White Lies

It would be a lie to say that everyone is going to enjoy a two-and-a-half hour rom-com about the very personal tragedies of a group of 20 and 30-something-year-old friends. But for those willing to immerse themselves in the bourgeois and very French world of director Guillaume Canet, Little White Lies is a highly pleasurable and provocative experience.
 
The film opens with one of the group's members being hit by a truck while riding on his moped, wired on cocaine. Deciding that there is little they can do while he is in intensive care, his friends choose to take their usual vacation together anyway, insisting that they will come back the moment he takes a turn for the better.
 
What ensues is an ambling exploration of relationships, friendships, and everything that makes them so flawed, and at the same time so core to who we are.
 
Canet, who both wrote and directed the film, has said that he put a lot of himself into it, which, following a period of personal crisis, "helped me to open my eyes and realise that sometimes I was lying to myself".
 
The cast, including Canet's girlfriend Marion Cotillard, who won the best actress Oscar in 2008 for playing Edith Piaf, are all old-time favourites of the director, either from work or from his childhood. This intimacy shows; the truth and subtlety that pervades most of the characters and their behaviour towards each other is enough to provoke a huge range of emotions despite a fairly static plot.
 
In this respect, Little White Lies is not a patch on Canet's previous blockbuster, the thrilling Tell No One. But what it lacks in drama and suspense it makes up for in laugh-out-loud humour and a thoroughly likeable cast.
 
Cotillard, current darling of the French cinema, plays bisexual Marie, who finds more solace in spliffs than in her numerous doting lovers. As Mark Olsen writes in the LA Times, "There is a mischievous playfulness to her performance here, with a deep undercurrent of sadness, that makes for a most remarkable turn".
 
With a stunning soundtrack, and echoes of the 1980s ensemble film The Big Chill, this is a slow burner that, for those so inclined, won't fail to delight. It is released in the UK on April 15.
 
WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING:Leo Robson, Financial Times: "Writer-director Guillaume Canet shows a remarkable lack of tact and skill in just about every area, from the rationing of revelations to the portrayal of emotions. At times the film seems like a farce without jokes, at others like a satire without observations." (2/5 stars.)

Xan Brooks, Guardian: "Little White Lies unspools as glossy, high-grade tosh, a sun-dappled Big Chill, without the rigour or insight required to make you care about these people and wonder which bed they will eventually wind up in." (2/5 stars.)
 
Anna Smith, Empire: "It’s hard to relate to their apparent neglect of their hospitalised friend, who only comes into their thoughts occasionally. At 154 minutes, this is far from the breezy little comedy it first appears. Still, as ensemble relationships dramas go, this one’s well worth taking the rough with the smooth." (4/5 stars.)
 
Jordan Mintzer, Variety: "In the end, Canet manages to sketch a disjointed, occasionally effective portrait of characters who are too caught up in their own personal melodramas - in their own little lies - to be concerned with Ludo's condition. With its bloated running time and tonal shifts, the story tends to steer off course, though strong performances help keep it in tow." ·