Closing out the Gene Siskel Film Center’s Belgium-centric Chicago European Union Film Festival is the latest work from writer/director/actor Dany Boon. He plays 50-year-old Tridan, an open-hearted man who grew up at a Club Med resort in a tropical location, where, at the age of eight, he met the love of his life, Violette, a girl of his own age who also seemed alone in the world. She agreed to run away with him, away from the place where poor Tridan would make new, young friends once a week only to be forced to say goodbye to them at the end of their stay. It was a heartbreaking routine that left Tridan in a state of arrested development and slightly traumatized. Their attempted escape results in the accidental death of Tridan’s loving father (Maxime Gasteuil), something his mother (Caroline Anglade) has held against him and used to keep him from leaving their home in paradise.
But when Tridan announces that he’s leaving for Paris to seek out Violette and confess his love for her, Tridan’s mother gives him the keys to his father’s secret studio apartment in Paris. When he arrives, Tridan quickly learns what a tough city Paris can be, having his luggage stolen and finding a strange man in the apartment, a man who turns out to be his half-brother, Louis (Kad Merad), a secret child their mutual father had with a woman with whom he was having an affair. Technically, Tridan owns the apartment, so Louis tries to get Tridan to sign away the rights to the unit by agreeing to find this long-lost Violette for him. Instead, he recruits his sometime girlfriend Roxane (Charlotte Gainsbourg) to pretend to be Violette and seduce Tridan so that he’ll agree to leave Paris.
At its heart, Life for Real is a meant to be a lighthearted comedy about identity, clinging to ancient loves when nothing in the present looks promising, and complicated family dynamics, but it occasionally dips its toes into something more profound by addressing loss, broken hearts, and how the most naive among us are the first to get taken advantage of. Because Tridan is such a warm-hearted person, not surprisingly, Roxane begins to really fall for him, which means it’s only a matter of time before the truth comes out. Meanwhile, Louis at first sees his newfound half-brother as a nuisance, but the two grow closer over the course of the film, with unexpected results, most of which stem from Louis going through a nasty divorce. The film is breezy and amusing, and while Tridan’s fish-out-of-water routine gets tired quickly, it transforms into something else that is both healing and crushing.
The film screens at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Sunday, March 10, at 3:15pm.
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