The Big Picture Review

• 28th Jul 2011

The Big Picture is a great film marred by its ending, which is a step up from its origins as a pretty good book (by Douglas Kennedy) marred by a completely preposterous ending.

Relocating the action from Manhattan and Montana to Paris and Montenegro, director Eric Lartigau creates a slow burn of a film that makes Paul Exben’s journey from high-flying lawyer to struggling artist plausible and engrossing. Exben, played with an everyman charm by next-big thing Romain Duris, inadvertently kills his wife’s lover. Assuming the dead man’s identity, Exben flees his comfortable middle-class life, his career and his children to restart his life in a sleepy Montenegrin village as the photographer he really always wanted to be. It helps that the other expats he meets also seem to be hiding out. “How come your French is so good?” he asks his new girlfriend, but he never gets an answer. His new life goes beautifully until his photography career starts to take off.

This is not an unselfconscious film in as much as Lartigau is not above employing recurring motifs – water being the main one (top tip: whenever Exben takes a shower, a swim or a journey by water his life is about to change) – but it pays so much attention to detail that it’s hard not to feel a bit ripped off by the final scenes, which seem to have been imported from a more bombastic, less considered film. It jars that a director who would spend a decent chunk of time showing just how difficult it is to dispose of an adult’s corpse on your own (for example), and establishing why it is that such a likeable guy’s wife would leave him, would then wrap things up with a scenario that seems so rushed and overly contrived.

Given the quality of what’s come before the finale is almost forgivable, but it turns what could have been a great film into one that is merely very good.

Clare Moody