Chinese Puzzle (2013)

Cédric Klapisch returns for a third pass at Xavier Rousseau, a man who has spent a decade making the same romantic miscalculations with marginally better tailoring. When Wendy takes the children to New York, Xavier follows, because proximity to his offspring apparently outweighs his aversion to any form of planning. He lands in Brooklyn with his Belgian friend Isabelle, who is pregnant by way of his sperm donation, and her Chinese-American girlfriend Ju. The arrangement is presented without ceremony. Klapisch's New York is casually multiethnic, and the lesbian couple at its center receives genuine narrative weight, including a pregnancy, an infidelity involving a second Isabelle, and a furtive exit through a window. None of this is announced as a statement. It simply occupies the plot, which is its own modest achievement.

The cultural machinery of the film is Chinatown, a green-card marriage, and an immigration officer who squints. These are comic devices, deployed for farce and never for sermon. Xavier marries Nancy, the niece of a cab driver he rescued from road rage, and the pair perform domesticity for a skeptical bureaucrat. Wendy's wealthy boyfriend John lives above Central Park while Xavier scrapes by, yet the film declines to draw an economic lesson from the contrast. There is no climate anxiety here, no body politics, no neurological taxonomy. The film has other things on its mind, mostly Xavier's inability to finish a novel.

Schopenhauer and Hegel appear in brief hallucinations, offering philosophical garnish to a man who cannot complete a sentence about his own life. The tone stays breezy. When the editor complains that the finished book ends too happily, Xavier replies that when you find happiness there is nothing more to say. It is a soft landing for a soft trilogy, executed with enough charm to justify the trip across the Atlantic, twice, in both directions, and then once more for the parade.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}