(courtesy IMDb)
Beginnings are everything when it comes to storytelling – sure you need an engaging middle and a decisively satisfying ending but if things go awry at the start, you’re not going to be waiting around for anything that comes after – and A Difficult Year (Une année difficile) has one of the best you’ve likely ever seen.
Set to the retro sounds of Jacques Brel’s “La Valse à mille temps (The Waltz of a Thousand Beats)”, the opener to a film which surprises at every turn, depicts first a demonstration at a department in a mall by an Extinction Rebellion-type group against rampant Black Friday consumerism which gives away, after the police arrive and let the long-massed shoppers in to grab the bargains on offer, to a frenzy of dog-eat-dog grabbing which is unedifying at best and assaulting at first.
It doesn’t show humanity at its best in either regard; neither the arrogant environmental activists, consumed by their own rightness of action (it’s not that the point they make isn’t valid; it’s the crushing self-righteousness of the execution which is at issue) nor the consumers who treat other people like objects to be violently displaced as they rush to grab goods for a discount.
In other words, as PR for Homo Sapiens go, the scene is a bust but as a kicker of a start to what turns out to be a wonderfully funny and clever film that’s happy to skewer humanity in all its flawed iterations, the opening to A Difficult Year (Une année difficile) is hilarious, brilliantly bombastic and theatrically, impressively rich.
The good news is that the film follows up this grandly evocative and cleverly thoughtful opening with a film that happily looks at the way people seek meaning in their lives and how, in the pursuit of that, all sorts of flaws and shortcomings are overlooked until the point is reached at which they can’t be ignored any longer.
Centred on three people – activist Cactus (Noémie Merlant), the code name for the anti-consumerism group’s leader, and new friends Albert Laprade (Pio Marmaï) and Bruno Ambrosi ( Jonathan Cohen) who start off as heavily-in-debt who joined the group for, shall we say, less than idealistic or altruistic reasons – A Difficult Year (Une année difficile) initially looks like it’s going to be some sort of serious attack on the evils of climate change-encouraging consumerism.
Sure, the start of the film is gloriously and enthrallingly tongue-in-cheek and it’s clear there is some seriously considered whimsy and quirkiness at work in the film’s DNA, but there is no sense that the story is going to go the way it does.
That it does veer off, rather wonderfully, into something else entirely, is a credit to co-writers and co-directors Oliver Nakache and Éric Toledano who manage to give the movie a backbone of thoughtful messaging without once becoming polemic or tiresomely preachy in their delivery.
They seem to take a leaf out of Mary Poppins’ book, deciding that a spoonful of sugar or some satirical comedy and rom-com level hilarity, is the way to get people to pay attention to the fact that maybe we don’t need that cut-price TV after all, not only because its production is contributing to a burden our beautiful but fragile big, blue world can’t sustain but also because if getting your hands on it means treating someone else like dirt, then maybe its far more a negative than a positive?
Wrapping some reasonably serious messaging into a quirkily funny film is a masterstroke because where people, or not enough people, anyway, may not listen to straight down the line ranting – and really who does? The only people who benefit from this, and its illusory, are those who deliver it, and really its a pyrrhic victory since nothing more than a temporary warm, inner glow is achieved – quite a few will happily lap up what you’re saying if the characters are comedically flawed, the storyline relatably down-to-earth and the concerns of everyone involved, lofty or otherwise, are all too often dictated not by the best that we can collectively be but rather by very personal, selfish concerns.
The people in Difficult Year (Une année difficile) are wonderfully flawed and grounded, and as Albert and Bruno, who are initially after cheap beer and a chance to clear their suffocating debts, go on journeys off their own to becoming better though not necessarily good people, the film comes alive precisely we’re watching people reach futilely for what they think is good for them only to realise, though in a flawless way (who wants that? No one is ever entirely redeemed or spotlessly redeemed), that maybe life will be better if they try for something that goes against their normal instincts.
At its core, though, Difficult Year (Une année difficile) is a love letter to the brokenness of humanity, and how rather than being a condemning death knell, that maybe it’s the best thing about us.
We aim high, and often fail to hit the mark – perhaps that why eco groups and religions and a host of other earnest belief systems are so strident and desperate to make their point; we know we’re not going where we want to go and we make enough noise to delude ourselves and drown that out – but we try at least, and Difficult Year (Une année difficile) is all about what happens when all that’s exposed and we have a choice whether we forgive and forget and move on, or we stay on our pedestals screaming down at those who disappointed us and pierced our rubbery veil of self-justification.
It’s funny, it’s clever, thoughtful and quite affecting in its own way, making Difficult Year (Une année difficile) one of those films that subverts expectations, rather perfectly in fact (you can say the same for the characters but then, that’s the point, really), and which delivers some on-point and timely messaging though not what you expect or in the way you might expect if you do, entertaining us beautifully while it does so.