L'homme qui voulait vivre sa vie (Éric Lartigau, 2010)

The initial fifteen minutes or so of The Big Picture fill me with an ominous foreboding that once again a French film has decided that the daily lives of smug, wealthy Parisians with their nannies and dinner parties are quite enough to entertain a middle-class audience for two hours, but then the central character, a young lawyer, starts suspecting his wife is having an affair, there is a confrontation with the other man involved and suddenly everything unravels in quite a shocking way. My hands are rather tied by the necessity to refrain from laying out exactly what transpires next, but suffice it to say that there is a strong Hitchcockian air in following a tortured, guilty protagonist (Romain Duris, who proves a perfect fit for this) desperate to avoid being caught and it keeps you guessing right up to the end, which is no easy feat in a well-worn genre.

7/10