A Perfect Man (2015)

A Perfect Man arrives from 2015, a year that now reads as a frontier. Yann Gozlan's thriller follows Matthieu Vasseur, a struggling novelist who finds a dead soldier's Algerian War diary among the possessions he is paid to clear and publishes it under his own name. Acclaim follows. So does a blackmailer, a corpse, and a long night of disposal at sea. It is a tidy machine of guilt and improvisation, assembled from the oldest materials in the genre, and it has no interest in saying anything about the world beyond its own plot. This is not a complaint. It is a classification.

The audit comes back clean. Alice Fursac is a book critic and a love interest, and the film makes no argument about her, gendered or otherwise. The Algerian War manuscript functions purely as stolen property; the film never pauses over the colonial history it borrows, only the inconvenience of being caught. The publishing trade appears as a setting for fraud, not as an object of economic critique. Matthieu's hallucinations are the products of stress and conscience, meaning they are a plot mechanism. Nobody in the cast exists to make a point. A North African surname appears in the credits and carries no weight in the narrative at all.

Here is a film that could be screened for an audience in 1955 and lose nothing. No sermon, no moralizing monologue, no scene in which a character explains the correct position on anything. The camera watches a man dig himself deeper, then walk into cash-in-hand obscurity while his posthumous novel is feted in a bookshop window. That is the entire transaction. We grade it accordingly, which is to say we grade almost nothing, and we do so with the grim satisfaction of a sommelier presented with a glass of water.