La Confession (2017)
Directed by Nicolas Boukhrief

Film Review

After making a name for himself with a series of gritty urban thrillers - Le Convoyeur (2003), Gardiens de l'ordre (2009), Made in France (2015) - director Nicolas Boukhrief makes an unexpected detour with La Confession, a war-time melodrama loosely adapted from Béatrix Beck's best-selling novel Léon Morin, Prêtre, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1952.  Boukhrief is not the first capable thriller director to tackle Beck's compelling study in repressed desire - Jean-Pierre Melville made an eminently respectable attempt of the same in 1961, meticulously crafting what has come to be regarded as a minor classic of French cinema, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Emmanuelle Riva both excelling in the lead roles.  Boukhrief's take on Beck's novel is bound to suffer in comparison with Melville's superior and far more nuanced film, but the presence of charismatic leads Romain Duris and Marine Vacth is enough to prevent it from being written off as a lacklustre remake.

A former model, Marine Vacth found fame a few years ago when François Ozon cast her in the lead role of Jeune et jolie (2013).  Romain Duris needs no introduction - in the course of the past two decades he has proven he can play just about any role under the sun, with varying degrees of success.  Improbable as it may seem, the casting of the hyper-charismatic Duris and über-sensual Vacth turns out to be the film's one winning card - both actors impress with measured performances that do ample justice to the subtlety and humanity of the source novel.  This is in spite of a flat script that does them few favours and feels for the most part as if it is the most laboriously mechanical reworking of a literary text imaginable.  Away from the mesmerising intellectual jousting tournaments between the two leads, which make up the bulk of the runtime, the film struggles to pass muster as the most anaemic of wartime dramas, populated by thinly sketched characters that fail to interest and provide a pointless distraction from the main event.

Boukhrief's mise-en-scène lacks the rigour and inspired touch that we find in his recent crime dramas, and his attempts to bring a thriller dimension to the central romance are mostly wasted effort.  Far more impressive is Manuel Dacosse's restrained and suitably moody photography, which conveys not only the oppressive mood of life in occupied France during the war, but also, more crucially, the repressed desire felt by the two protagonists as they fall increasingly under each other's spell.  Falling horribly flat on both the writing and directing fronts, La Confession scarcely bears comparison with Jean-Pierre Melville's film but the chemistry between Duris and Vacth has such a visceral intensity that it would be sacrilege to write it off altogether.  The full impact of the forbidden romance isn't appreciated until the final scene, which cruelly betrays how great a film this might have been had more thought and attention gone into the script.

Film Synopsis

In the present day, a priest is summoned to the bedside of a dying woman, to hear her final confession.  The woman, Barny, has long harboured a secret which she feels she must impart to a sympathetic ear before she dies.  Barny's story begins at the time of the Nazi Occupation of France, when she was working in a post office in a small French town.  The latest subject of gossip for Barny and her co-workers is the recent arrival of a young and good-looking Catholic priest.  With so many men lost to the war - either killed in action or held as prisoners-of-war (the latter being the fate of Barny's husband) - Léon Morin cannot help attracting the attention of the town's womenfolk, even those who are non-believers.  Though she is herself a committed atheist, Barny cannot resist confronting Morin in the confessional.  It is the first in a series of encounters in which the staunch Communist and dedicated man of God lock horns and challenge each other's deeply held convictions.  Despite their manifest differences of opinion, Barny and Morin soon develop a mutual respect and liking for one another, and it isn't long before both become aware that their feelings towards the other are not simply platonic.  The relationship is soon put to the test when the Germans take ten of the townspeople hostage...