Every Wednesday, three good friends of more than 30 years, now all in their 50s, Walter Orsini (Gérard Lanvin), owner of a Michelin one-star Parisian restaurant, called Les Trois Zebrès (The 3 Zebra) and a single parent who dotes on her 20 year-old daughter Clémence ( Ana Girardot) meets his 2 friends of more than 30 years, Jacques ( Wladimir Yordanoff) a homosexual intellectual who knows all about literature at Jacque's bookstore and Paul (Jean-Hugues Anglade) an expert on Faulkner who had already written copiously about that novelist of the so-called "stream of consciousness" every Wednesday at Jacques' bookstore where they would share some excellent food, vintage wine brought by Walter and the free flow of no holds barred conversation contributed by all. Of the three, there's little doubt that Walter has the strongest personality: he holds on to one principle: between friends and people, there should be no lies. That's because when he was young, his father hurt his mother by lying about his outside relationships. He is impulsive, direct, sincere and honest to fault: always telling others what he truly thinks about any matter, even if it might be a matter of great delicacy and his timing might not be the best. Is he right? Were there really no secrets in his relationship with those nearest and dearest to him? Or should one tell the truth under all circumstances?
We got a clue to what the director may want to let us know right at the start of the film, when Clemence was writing her Baccalaureat thesis on the novels of Hemingway, the master American novelist of "realism" known for giving merely the "facts" in a "matter of fact" and understated way. She was trying to develop a thesis that often what is explicitly stated may be quite misleading and may just be the tip of the iceberg and that perhaps 9/10th of what really matters lies hidden from sight in the murky depths of the human psyche.
In the course of the film, we learn that Jacques, unbeknownst to Walter but known to Paul, was a closet homosexual and that Clemence was secretly carrying on an affairs with Paul and that for the purpose of keeping Clemence close to himself, he ostensibly found an apartment for her when she expressed a desire to rent an apartment close to the university the better to prepare for her final examination but when she showed undiluted delight at one, her father let loose some cockroaches in a cupboard and then used that as a pretext for not wanting that apartment. When the film ends, when everything in Jacques's bookstore had been removed after a sale because Jacques had won a local election and had no further time to look after the bookstore and one of the three buddies expressed regret that that that would be their very last renunion there, Walter blurted out to Paul and Jacques' surprise, that he was talking nonsense and announced that the purchaser of the property was none other than he himself!
I like the way the director Stéphan Archinard handled the film: letting his message be shown by the dramatic irony of the action as it unfolded and hinting at what it was that he was trying to say and saying everything very concisely through the mouth of the characters and cutting out any words not strictly necessary for revealing their attitudes, their feelings, their thoughts. The editing is excellent. So is the acting, especially that of Gérard Lanvin who portrays the kind of self-assured, opinionated and impetuous honesty of Walter so naturally that he seems not to be acting at all. A question posed excellently by the director and the implicit view of the director expertly demonstrated, without exaggeration, without any explicit moralizing. 30 years of friendship which lies can't destroy. A work of art.
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