Rock'n Roll (2017)

Guillaume Canet has made a film in which Guillaume Canet plays Guillaume Canet, a man informed by a younger co-star that he is no longer rock'n roll and can no longer open a picture. This is the entire engine. He mopes, he consults his girlfriend Marion Cotillard, also playing Marion Cotillard, he submits to cosmetic interventions, and he attempts to recapture a virility he never quite possessed. The cast is a roll call of French cinema's comfortable middle, everyone gamely playing themselves, which spares the production the expense of writing characters.

The satire is aimed squarely inward, at the vanity of the Parisian industry and its terror of irrelevance. There is a mild contempt for producers and their commercial arithmetic, but it is the contempt of insiders who still want the cheque to clear. The plastic surgery material is played for laughs, the body as a midlife punchline, which is the precise opposite of any contemporary wellness orthodoxy. Nothing here interrogates power in a structural sense. It notices that famous men age, finds this funny, then finds it sad, then finds it funny again.

On the matter of modern social consciousness, the ledger is nearly blank. The ensemble is white, the concerns are male, and the film's interest in women extends to their function as mirrors and morale officers. No racial reckoning, no environmental conscience, no queering of the text, no neurodivergent reading, no revisionist argument about the past. This is contemporary self-parody and nothing more, a vanity project with the good manners to admit what it is. We are left with a competent, amiable comedy about a man's fear of becoming unremarkable, a fear the film itself does not entirely escape.