A Great Friend

Vincent is a well known entrepreneur. His life consists of meetings, phone calls and decisions. His car breaks down on a mountain road and he is stranded in a valley. Pierre lives there; outside modern life, in a house without electricity, doing everything himself. He helps Vincent and offers him a few days. The two men are opposites. Vincent is impatient at first, then curious. There is something in Pierre's past; there is a reason he built his life this way and he does not tell it. Vincent has a life he left behind too, and his company is calling him back. Éric Besnard writes and directs. Lambert Wilson plays Vincent and Grégory Gadebois plays Pierre; Marie Gillain is in the cast. It is a French production. It opened in France on 18 January 2023. It was shot in autumn 2021 in the Maurienne valley in Savoie and in Ain; the locations are real and no studio was used. Besnard wrote the character Gadebois plays as a marine biologist; the man's retreat to the country is a choice rather than ignorance. The matter it treats is speed; the film offers slowness as a virtue and says so directly. The landscape and the daily work run inside the narrative; the scenes of cooking, wood, water and repair are held long. Its limit is predictability; where the two characters will arrive is clear from the start and the conflict is low. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet French films about friendship and narratives grounded in nature. Who it is not for: it is predictable, the message is delivered directly, and there is no dramatic tension.