Like its protagonist, the film sells out for the security of convention and complacency.
The Big Picture(L'homme qui voulait vivre sa vie)
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
France · 2010
1h 54m
Director Eric Lartigau
Starring Romain Duris, Marina Foïs, Catherine Deneuve, Niels Arestrup
Genre Thriller
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Paul Exben's life is defined by success: he is a partner at one of Paris's most exclusive law firms, he has a big salary, a big house, a glamorous wife and two picture perfect sons. But when he finds out that Sarah, his wife, is cheating on him with Greg Kremer, a local photographer, a rush of blood provokes Paul into a fatal error...
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What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
The Big Picture is really Duris's picture; the actor toggles effortlessly between arrogant, feral, remorseful and ruthless as the plot throws one curveball after the next.
A few plot holes hold back what is otherwise a well cast and compelling picture.
New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme
Much of the plot stretches credulity, but the way it's constructed keeps tension high.
The Big Picture has been compared to "The Talented Mr. Ripley," the twice-filmed Patricia Highsmith novel about a sociopath who kills and then impersonates a rich acquaintance. But in spirit it's closer to Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975 "The Passenger," with Jack Nicholson as an existential adventurer who poses as a dead stranger.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
The direction from Eric Lartigau keeps things moving along fast and furious: preposterous it may be, the movie is carried off with some style.
For most of the way, right up until a hastily contrived and deeply unsatisfying ending, the film perceptively sketches a fractured identity, a man who enters a new life carrying painful remnants of the old.
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
Paul is not a sociopath like Tom Ripley, and the movie does not convey the same diabolical Hitchcockian sense of being manipulated by a slightly sadistic master puppeteer. As the story sprawls across the screen, it darts from one incident to the next as though it were inventing itself as it goes along.
Built around a multilayered performance from Duris, it's a film unafraid to pose more questions than it answers.
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