A good movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since it was directed by Hirokazu Koreeda, I was quite eager to check it out. What made this movie even more interesting was the fact that, for the first time in his impressive career, Koreeda was working outside of Japan in another language than Japanese and, on top of that, he had a top cast at his disposal (Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, Ethan Hawke, Ludivine Sagnier). Unfortunately, even if it turned out to be a decent watch, it wasn’t much more than that, I'm afraid, and it is easily the least interesting movie I have seen so far from the Japanese master. First of all, the story was not bad but it wasn’t nothing really original and, to make things worse, there was just too much extra stuff going on. Just take Fabienne for example. Her ex-husband showed up suddenly for a single day but there was also her help/assistant who left after working for her for decades and also a guy cooking some Italian food and apparently also sleeping in her bed. Well, all these 3 men were just barely developed and you might wonder if it wouldn’t have worked better without them. In a similar fashion, Ethan Hawke was completely wasted playing some actor with some apparently alcoholic issues (another completely unnecessary and half-baked idea) who never gets involved because everyone speaks with French and he speaks only English. However, there is no denying that it was really cool to have Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, two titans of the French cinema, facing each other and they were both at the top of their game. Seriously, they were both quite fascinating to behold and the damned thing could have been actually quite amazing if it would have been more focused on them by removing most of the other characters. Anyway, to conclude, even if the damned thing was rather half-baked, I still think it is worth a look, just to see Deneuve and Binoche working so well together.