Nanni Moretti's Cannes-winner is restrained and moving, with the Italian writer/director forsaking his comic urges to examine how a teenage son's death affects a family. Moretti plays the father, a psychoanalyst who, grieving, loses interest in his patients. Awkward emotions are deftly handled: Hollywood should watch this and learn.
He helped Audrey Tautou steal your heart in Amélie, and Tiersen, like that film, evokes the passing of French iconographies (Pernod, madeleines, poujadisme) and the culture's quiet assimilation of change, with or without accordions. The slyly sentimental, Nyman-leaning postmodernism of "A Quai" and "Bagatelle" absorbs genres from Rai to post-rock but remains uniquely French. Zazou and Eno, watch your arses.
Highly absorbing film about respectable family man Vincent (Aurelien Recoing) who, after losing his job as a consultant, invents a prestigious new career and betrays close friends with fictitious investment deals. Juggling fact with fiction creates ever-spiralling tensions until Vincent's double life closes in around him. A deceptively profound drama.