Mr Sim (“like the card”), the titular protagonist of The Very Private Life of Mister Sim (La Vie très privée de Monsieur Sim), is a talkative man.
It doesn’t matter who you are – a disinterested businessman in premium economy on a flight, a stranger in a roadside diner, a woman recording airport announcements for an adultery-aiding service, François Sim (Jean-Pierre Bacri)
will talk to you.
Veering between un-self aware and painfully, touchingly so, he is reasonably fresh off a painful divorce, a job loss and the all but inevitable subsequent breakdown, a man who has retreated into himself in that devastatingly complete way typical of people cooping, or rather not, with overwhelming loss.
As you’d expect from someone robbed of their life anchors, he is adrift, unable to see a way forward; that’s not to say he is morosely sitting around in a drunken stupor or staring dully out the window.
He is trying to re-engage in life – a job offer to promote eco toothbrushes on a sales road trip to southern France is taken up with alacrity and the possibility of romance with a much-younger woman Poppy (Vimala Pons) is happily seized but overall life is rudderless and non-descript, begging for someone to fill in the blanks.
But Mr Sims isn’t entirely sure what that might be, his only guide the tragic example of British yachtsman Donald Crowhurst who died on one of the first solo round-the-world yacht races in 1969 by his own hand when it became obvious to him that his fraudulent reporting of his positions throughout the race would seem him living a lie for the rest of his life should he win.
Intrigued by the story of a man who fabricated an entire experience under the weight of public expectation – everyone is constantly asking Mr Sim how he is doing from his ex-wife Caroline (Isabelle Gélinas) to old friends and would’ve been lovers Luigia (Valeria Golino) to which he only replies that things are looking better; what else can he say? – and fascinated by the man who introduced him to it Samuel (Mathieu Amalric), he devours everything he can on Crowhurst, deeply moved by a fellow human being taxed beyond salvation by circumstances well beyond his control.
by Jonathan Coe (image via Blogs Mediapart FR)
The Very Private Life of Mister Sim (La Vie très privée de Monsieur Sim) is a quirky but undeniably heartfelt film directed by Michel Leclerc which spotlights, with a mix of humour, insight and searing reality, how awful a state unending “privacy”, better known as loneliness, can be.
It’s touchingly offbeat observation of the depths of the human condition – Mr Sim convinces himself at his increasingly off-the-rails roadtrip goes messily on that his GPS voice Emmanuelle is the love of his life, the only one who truly understands him – is delivered with the affectionately insightful but unsparingly realistic portrayals common to French cinema.
You keep expecting Mr Sim to find the kind of resoundingly happy ending so beloved of American cinema but as he visits lost loved such as Luigia and attempts to re-connect with his 13 year old daughter in a nightclub of all places, it becomes clear that happiness, if it’s going to find him, won’t come soon or by conventional means.
When rock bottom comes racing up to meet him, an encounter which, like much of the film, refreshingly doesn’t play out like you think it might, he is forced to decide – is there a way forward or is excess, debilitating “privacy” to be his lot in life?
It might sound overly melodramatic but for Mr Sim this existential dilemma is an entirely practical one, borne of an innate predilection for order, of expectation and certainty taking precedence over impetuous possibility.
In sometimes clumsily-inserted flashbacks, we see Sim time and again walk away from pivotal life moments that could have profoundly changed his life.
Its not a dynamic that has wholly defined his life – he wouldn’t have married Caroline without a small willingness to seize the moment – but it’s common enough a motivation that when Mr Sim thinks back on his life he’s sees all too few opportunities taken.
The mix of comedy and pathos lends the film an exceptional sense of humanity.
With its mix of the surreal and the quirky, the hilariously and sadly realistic, and its unwillingness to automatically default to the happy ending you expect, The Very Private Life of Mister Sim (La Vie très privée de Monsieur Sim) affirms that people are simply not meant to be alone.
But that we often end up in that state through decisions that on the surface don’t appear to have widespread ramifications but which snowball down the course of our lives till we are adrift from humanity, much like Crowhurst, and unable to find our way back despite our best efforts.
It’s near impossible not to identify with Mr Sim – exaggerated for comedic and dramatic his travails may be but he is still Every Person, the distillation of the human condition when it’s caught in a lonely, all-too-private world and simply wants to reconnect and give some meaning back to life which once promised so much.