Little White Lies

★★★

(2010)

Guillaume Canet’s Little White Lies is an odd ensemble film. It takes great pride and time in presenting it’s many characters in a myriad of unlikeable ways and asks you to come on holiday with them all to a beach house after the near death of a close friend… and care about them.

Max (François Cluzet) is so annoyingly full of anxiety and stress that he can barely function as a human being even with his closest friends, the self medicating and lonesome Marie (Marion Cotillard) is almost totally unlovable no matter how gorgeous and chiropractor Vincent (Benoît Magimel) is living a lie after years of being inexplicably in love with the uptight Max; facts which will take the holidaying friends into dark and stormy waters.

There’s also Antoine (Laurent Lafitte) who is obsessively texting and endlessly whittering on about the girl who dumped him; While bolshy, womanising Éric (Gilles Lellouche) is finally coming to terms with the fact that he has to grow up, maybe a little too late. It’s wonderful to watch the performances here but the film is glaringly over long and slightly too sugary towards the final half hour. Canet has, in essence, updated The Big Chill with a bit less heart and revamped it into a film which may be asking you slightly too much of you given the circumstances of the story and it’s characters.

The cast are solid and the setting is certainly beautiful however a few too many excesses in a film ripe for shmaltz at the hands of a young (albeit talented) director means that Little White Lies ends up more of a small fib than a massive porky pie.