| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
| Guillaume Canet | ... | Alain | |
| Juliette Binoche | ... | Selena | |
| Vincent Macaigne | ... | Léonard | |
| Christa Théret | ... | Laure | |
| Nora Hamzawi | ... | Valérie | |
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Pascal Greggory | ... | Marc-Antoine |
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Laurent Poitrenaux | ... | L'auteur, chez Alain |
| Sigrid Bouaziz | ... | L'éditrice | |
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Lionel Dray | ... | L'éditeur |
| Nicolas Bouchaud | ... | David | |
| Antoine Reinartz | ... | Le libraire à Arles | |
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Aurélia Petit | ... | Invitée de Marc-Antoine |
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Thierry de Peretti | ... | Invité de Marc-Antoine |
| Violaine Gillibert | ... | Paloma, l'amie de Marc-Antoine | |
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Jean-Luc Vincent | ... | L'auteur de Marécage |
Set in the Parisian publishing world, an editor and an author find themselves in over their heads, as they cope with a middle-age crisis, the changing industry and their wives.
As a fan of European films with an intellectual spark and some witty humor, I was expecting to enjoy this. Despite a slow start, I kept hoping for an eventual improvement, but the film just dragged on and on, repeating the same idea in many different settings, to the point of exhaustion, for 108 tedious minutes.
While there were a couple of funny moments, they were too few and far apart. As far as the story went, there was not much beyond the initial concept. As a character-driven film, I found most characters to be flat and unrelatable, particularly the protagonist and his romantic interests. The minor development at the end felt forced and out of place.
Since I saw this at the Toronto Film Festival, a Q&A followed at the end. Unlike other public screenings that I've attended so far, most questions this time came from people in the film industry, who themselves mentioned that they could probably better relate to the book publishing industry, thus this film, than most. Since I'm not of the industry nor a French speaker, I could only hope that some of its charm lost in translation.