A mature and truly revelatory departure from the glossy superficiality of Beineix’s earlier work, this is further distinguished by a sense that it was made by a director in his twilight trying to impart the wisdom and forsight of his years, rather than by the youthful 47-year-old we know Beineix to be.
Indeed, both in the visceral and intellectual sense, this is very much an old man’s film with Montand 0 in, sadly, his last role – at the centre of a haunting, nostalgic and very personal reflection on love and youth and the enlightenment that comes with great age. In a quietly dignified perforamance, he plays Leon, the gentle saga to a pair of unappealingly violent city kids, Tony (Martinez) and Jockey (Sall), whom he meets accidentally when he is discovered in the back of a car ethey have hijacked.
At once sad and joyful, disillusioned and full of hope, grey-tinged and bursting with colour, this somehow ads up to far more than the sum of its parts: as visually stunning cinema, as a glorious celebration of the uncomfortable vices and comforting virtues of human nature, as fine and fitting a swan song for Montand as ever ther could be.