Le grand bain (2018)

Directed by: Gilles Lellouche | 122 minutes | comedy, drama | Actors: Mathieu Amalric, Guillaume Canet, Benoît Poelvoorde, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Virginie Efira, Leïla Bekhti, Marina Foïs, Philippe Katerine, Félix Moati, Alban Ivanov, Balasingham Thamilchelvan, Jonathan Zaccaï, Mélanie Doutey, Noée Abita

What’s the matter with the pretentious French? One feel-good film after another has been rolling out of the can in recent years. Since ‘Amelie’, which could still be described as a light-hearted ode to Paris and women, the sophistication is somewhat different from French public film. ‘Le grand bain’ starts somewhat pretentiously with a kind of scientific explanation for the fact that a ’round doesn’t fit in a square’, as with children’s toys, but the tone is already ironic.

With the mischievous face of Mathieu Amalric – in a dressing gown accompanied by ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’, you naturally ask for it. We are waiting for a biopic about the writer Houellebecq with Amalric in the lead role, but this aside. The prime of the French acting scene makes an appearance in this film about a group of middle-aged men who practice synchronized swimming – and competitively, too. ‘The Marathon’ à la Française, it shouldn’t get any crazier.

Virginie Efira, recently brilliant in ‘Un amour impossible’, accompanies the gentlemen smoking from the diving board; the bellies of Amalric, Canet, Poelvoorde and Anglade, with which the entire volume of Gallic cinema can be filled, bulges unsaid. The roosters trump each other in a verbal sense, oh la la what a chat. There are problems, such as a child with Tourette’s; imagined as the demise of middle life, that keeps the tone light. A tone that is rubbed in at times, but that is part of the genre.

The men need a challenge, where you can groom each other in a masculine way. And that is only possible in competition. They need women to organize it, also very understandable. And then you go synchronized swimming, and if that didn’t fit into today’s what-makes-a-man discussion, it wouldn’t have to. It leads to a sympathetic, visually and musically lively Grande Finale, fashioned from chest hair and bathing caps. If you really want it, a circle fits in a square.