The Innocent Review: Louis Garrel’s Witty Blend of Family Comedy and Cat-and-Mouse Caper

In a dark shadow, a handsome man breaks down the proper use of a handgun. His craggy face, half-lit, ruminates on murder: “If you kill one man, you break even with death.” Then, suddenly, the scene ends. Not the scene in The Innocent, but the scene that Michel (Roschdy Zem) is rehearsing inside a prison under the tutelage of his acting teacher, Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg). Sylvie heaps mountains of praise on her student, and Michel breaks into a massive grin. He really nailed that scene. They’re engaged before the title card hits the screen.

Role-playing, theatricality, and slippery love quadrangles. It’s safe to say that Louis Garrel’s film, with its story of knotty love and escalating bouts of petty thievery, is his strongest to date, and by a considerable margin. Though his films tend to invite comparisons to the elder statesmen of the French New Wave, The Innocent is, almost surprisingly, more akin to the style of Éric Rohmer than to that of his own father, Philippe Garrel. Characters speak with a rapid intelligence on their own lives, yet their self-awareness doesn’t extend into their relationships, persistently precluding them from the happiness that they supposedly desire.

In The Innocent, everyone seems to want to protect Sylvie. Her son, Abel (Garrel), is a guide at an aquarium, where he prognosticates on the implicit social constructs of the animal kingdom, and protests his mother’s latest love affair with Michel. After all, she’s now been married three times within the span of a single decade, but Abel is also convinced that Michel’s reformation is a fallacy, and quickly starts stalking his new stepfather with a club-footed fervor.

Part of Abel’s obsession might be the result of his own love life’s tragic snag, as his ex-wife was the victim of a car accident. To cope, Abel spends most of his days alongside his late partner’s best friend, the eccentric and impulsive Clémence (Noémie Merlant). The pair follow Michel all over the place, from meeting to meeting and from Paris to Lyon, where he works at a corporate furniture store. Michel is faced with the inevitable conundrum of what to do with the good-natured buffoons when he becomes aware of their stalking, and though his business partner (Jean-Claude Pautot) suggests that he kill them, he decides to recruit them instead.

Michel’s intention is to make enough money from the theft of Iranian caviar in order to float Sylvie’s new flower shop, and this display of selfless love (plus the promise of some considerable hard cash) is enough to persuade Abel and Clémence to join the ragtag group of thieves. And what the two are expected to do for the operation brings about the film’s most beguiling moment, thanks in no small part to Merlant, who ably swings from gaiety to pointed trauma as she and Garrel are tasked with play-acting a lover’s quarrel to distract their target.

It’s in this scene where some locked-away feelings are freed, as well as where Merlant’s ability to bounce between emotional extremes feels most in line with the film’s tonally clashing strategies. As Clémence’s nagging pain at the loss of her friend pours through her mascaraed eyes, Abel struggles to distinguish between truth and fiction. In the end, it’s precisely the tonal ping-ponging that makes The Innocent so absorbing. It creates an air of ambiguity, and as the characters wrestle with their own false ideas of selflessness, so do we with their intentions.

It remains unclear whether Abel is genuinely protective of his mother or simply jealous of her fresh start. Michel, meanwhile, gaslights Sylvie, exploiting a false bonhomie with the suspicious Abel, and accuses his wife of merely pretending to care about flowers. She insists that her turn away from the theater is the “truth,” while Abel’s obsession with sleuthing necessitates a turn toward performance of his own. Elsewhere, Clémence radiates an ebullience in her everyday life, but Garrel takes care to show the viewer that, behind closed doors, she’s grappling with a pain that she’s trying to keep at bay. This through line of performativity suggests a lovely, biting theoretical question on the necessity of truthful communication. In The Innocent, perhaps the real McCoy isn’t radical honesty but a performance of the same.

At times, what Garrel is trying to do on a macro level feels elusive, but the film’s scene-to-scene vibes are seductive, with a thematic through line that exudes a cohesiveness that the script lacks. Throughout, Garrel and cinematographer Julien Poupard lace many deceptively simple téte-à-tétes with formal tricks, like a threatening conversation at the aquarium that deliberately breaks the 360-degree rule and a chase scene that effectively lays out the Oedipal love triangle with a comic-book split screen. Individual characters are bathed in their own distinctly muted neon hue, as if existing in a comedic French version of Sin City. All these unexpected cinematic flourishes infuse the breezy romance with the Hitchcockian tension of a cat-and-mouse caper.

Who is the innocent of the film’s title? In lieu of the narrative complexity of a traditional heist film, Garrel focuses on the cosmic complications of multiple characters stumbling toward self-betterment. As lies and truths unravel, with unspoken feelings coming to the fore and changing perspectives, Garrel’s characters flip from victim to criminal, from friend to lover, from imprisoned to liberated and back again. The innocent, it turns out, isn’t a single character but the person inside us all, playing at the version of ourselves we’d rather be.