Les Petits Mouchoirs (Guillaume Canet, 2010)

Canet's third feature as director is an ensemble piece with a group of friends on their annual holiday on the Gironde coast in the aftermath of the near-fatal road accident of one of their regular party. The comatose absentee is largely forgotten as the band frolic and agonise over their relationship problems.
Little White Lies was a huge hit in France, where pieces revolving around middle-class types without financial cares hopping in and out of each other's beds form a genre of their own. Canet's stab does contain its share of fizz in dialogue and a few scenes that suggest a sense of awareness of the shallowness of its characters. But it suffers throughout from an overreliance on the soundtrack (which is oddly entirely in English too, as if brazenly aiming for foreign sales) to bolster the drama, and then an indulgently weepy finale leaves little doubt that we're still meant to empathise with the self-centered crew. Think The Big Chill, only a reimagining where no-one really learns anything.

5/10