Written by Louis Garrel and Jean-Claude Carrière
Directed by Louis Garrel
Starring Louis Garrel, Laetitia Casta and Lily-Rose Depp
Running time: 1 hour and 15 minutes

by Audrey Callerstrom

On season one of CW’s musical-comedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom), sings “Sexy French Depression.” Shot in black and white, Rebecca mopes around France, smoking cigarettes, drinking wine, all the while acknowledging how glamorous it looks to feel so sad.

I thought of this song during Louis Garrel’s A Faithful Man, the second feature film from actor/director Garrel, whom you might recognize as one-third of the love trio from Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. At a brisk 75 minutes, A Faithful Man is a love story, although due to the low energy of the acting and the story, it’s hard to know what’s at stake. It takes place in a version of Paris that’s so quiet that in one scene Abel’s audible breathing acts as its own dialogue. The film opens with Abel (Garrel) and his girlfriend, Marianne (former Victoria’s Secret angel Laetitia Casta) easing into what would normally be a conversation punctuated by screams and tears; Marianne is pregnant, the baby is not Abel’s, she’s going to marry the father, Paul, and Abel needs to move out. Abel accepts the situation as though it was scheduled to happen.  

Nine years pass by until Marianne comes back into Abel’s life after Paul’s sudden (and possibly mysterious?) death. The funeral is where the central conflict of the film starts to take shape: does Abel belong with Marianne, who is eager, but not particularly happy, to have him back, or Paul’s younger sister, Eve (Lily Rose-Depp), who has pined for Abel ever since she was a child? “I was sad to be too young,” Eve says in voiceover as she recounts how, as a child, she would stalk Abel. She’s so infatuated with him, in fact, she has manufactured photos of them together, just like a little girl would keep.

In spite of his handsome broodiness (think Andrew Garfield with a stronger nose), neither of the women seem to truly love him, and understandably so – he’s beautiful, but dull. He’s a documentary filmmaker with amazing thick hair and somehow he’s also the kind of guy you’d leave alone in your studio apartment to mope and smoke, as Eve does. What distinguishes A Faithful Man from, say, a lesser Woody Allen film with a similar dynamic, is Marianne’s son, Joseph (Joseph Engel). Joseph is precocious, distrusting, and he’s the only one who knows that all these adults are kidding themselves. He’s so smart and intuitive he can predict the endings of films he’s never seen. He leaves a cell phone on record under his mother’s bed so that he can record her conversations, as well as her lovemaking (per his intuition, if Abel and Marianne really loved each other, they’d have sex more). Joseph turns out to be the most nuanced character in the film. Did Marianne actually kill Paul, as Joseph claims, or is this how Joseph grieves? The evidence is inconclusive. Ultimately it’s Joseph who brings all the adults together at the end to confront each other, but as we expect, much like throughout the film, they have nothing to say.