Him, by Guillaume Canet: Like an intriguing B-side of Rock'n roll [critique]

Relationship problems and an out-of-tune piano haunt this musician exiled on an island.

Guillaume Canet is the screenwriter, director and lead actor of Hima thriller about a musician who breaks down and isolates himself on a Breton island, hoping to be able to take stock there, in peace. Filmed between two lockdowns with Virginie Efira, Laëtita Casta, Nathalie Baye and Patrick Chesnais, this drama released in 2021 is to be (re)watched tonight on TMC. Is it worth it? Here is Première's review.

The Little Handkerchiefs, Rock n'roll, We will end up together… The intimate, sometimes openly autobiographical, nourishes a whole section of Guillaume Canet's cinema to which this Him brings a new stone. Unlike Rock n'rollno question here of assumed autofiction but the link between the two exists in their introspective side and the fact that Canet plays the main role. In this case a composer in double crisis – inspiration and marital – who goes to take refuge in an old house on a Breton island. And in this place cut off from the world, wife, mistress, parents, his son and his evil double will come to visit him in kinds of nocturnal and diurnal nightmares to settle their accounts with him. And vice versa.

There is some Blier Too beautiful for you in this quiet emergence of the offbeat supernatural in the heart of the most banal everyday life. The exercise, complex, works unevenly. It hits a wall as soon as the dialogues only stutter with what we have guessed (the scenes facing his father, the face-off between the two “Canets”…) or the acting is not up to par (the child playing his son is too much into recitation…). Because artificiality then invades the space and damages the fluidity of the overall gesture. On the other hand, in the moments of distressing silence in the heart of this building or when its actors (Virginie Efira, Laetitia Casta, Mathieu Kassovitz, amazing) seize with relish the offbeat acting that is offered to them, Him takes off. The playful aspect comes to tickle his depressive side without making him deviate from his path. Like an intriguing B-side of Rock'n roll.

First image of Guillaume Canet covered in blood in the thriller Ad Vitam