A PERFECT MAN / Un homme idéal

 

North American Premiere • Thriller • France, 2015

DCP • 2.35 • Dolby 5.1 • Color • 97 min

Directed by: Yann Gozlan

Written by: Yann Gozlan, Guillaume Lemans, Grégoire Vigneron

Cinematography: Antoine Roch

Film Editing: Grégoire Sivan

Original Score: Cyrille Aufort

Produced by: Wassim Béji (WY Productions), Thibault Gast, Matthias Weber (24 25 Films)

Coproduced by: TF1 Films Production, Mars Films

Cast: Pierre Niney (Mathieu), Ana Girardot (Alice), Valeria Cavalli (Hélène), Marc Barbé (Vincent)  

International Sales: SND Groupe M6

 

It starts out innocently enough. After all, where’s the harm in rescuing a dead man’s diary – a work that was destined, without his intervention, for a landfill? And anyway, he’s the one who recognized the diary’s potential as a novel, so why shouldn’t he sign the work as his own? Thus begins the meteoric rise of young Mathieu Vasseur, a heretofore-unpublished author eking out a living at his uncle’s moving company. Mathieu rides the wave as literature’s “Next Big Thing,” with growing concern over the mounting pressure of expectation for a second novel.  But Mathieu has more urgent matters to attend to, including Alice, a woman the old Mathieu could have only dreamed about, and his desperation to keep his secret safe will leave him feeling like a man dispossessed of his own life. No matter – if this is the cost of genius, so be it. With a tip of the hat to Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, this sun-drenched thriller is elevated by the immersive performance of Pierre Niney, who has had a meteoric rise of his own, culminating in a 2015 Best Actor César for Yves Saint Laurent.

 

French horror pictures tend to be all but ignored, but that wasn’t the case with the feature debut of writer/director Yann Gozlan, Caged (2010). Gozlan’s morbid tale of organ harvesting set in the Balkans was noted for a realism and restraint seldom seen in this type of film. For this, his second film, Gozlan set out to make a character driven thriller with a strong element of suspense tied to the themes of identity and the creative impulse. He developed the screenplay with a couple of heavy hitters: Guillaume Lemans, the co-screenwriter of all of Fred Cavayé’s features including Point Blank (2010) and Mea Culpa (North American Premiere COLCOA 2014), and Grégoire Vigneron, who was nominated for the César Award for Best Original Screenplay for Molière (2008), and for Best Adaptation for Little Nicolas (2010).

 

Quote:

“The strength of A Perfect Man comes (…) from the way Gozlan directs this morbid dance between adversaries, filmed under the sun of the Côté d’Azur, and from the charisma of Pierre Niney.”

– Geoffrey Crété CINEMAN