Little White Lies (2010)

Guillaume Canet's 2010 ensemble drama gathers a group of affluent Parisians at a seaside cottage after one of their number, Ludo, is left comatose by a traffic accident. They go on holiday anyway. Two and a half hours of sunburned introspection follow, along with marital drift and the slow disclosure of small dishonesties. The film arrives from a moment before the current classificatory era, and it shows. This is a story about comfortable white professionals whose comfort is never examined, only decorated with oysters and American pop songs.

The one element that registers on any progressive scale is Vincent's confession of attraction to his married friend Max. It is a genuine same-sex thread, played for discomfort and guilt instead of affirmation, and it resolves into awkwardness. The women fare worse. Libération's critic called them stereotypes, and the film does not mount a defense. Marie smokes pot and unravels. The wives exist mostly to absorb their husbands' crises.

Elsewhere the ledger is empty. Race never enters the frame. Neither does climate, nor any critique of money, since the characters are the money. Body positivity, neurodivergence, and historical revisionism are absent. The nearest thing to a sermon belongs to an oyster fisherman who tells the group a few plain truths, and it plays as character rather than instruction. It was a substantial hit in France, which is its own kind of data point. This is a mild, meandering, well-acted picture that wants nothing more than to be watched with a glass of something cold. It has been duly noted and filed.