Kennedy et moi

Samuel Polaris is a writer past forty and his life is coming apart in every direction at once. He cannot write, he is at odds with his wife, he cannot talk to his children, and at the dentist's he loses control and bites the man. He buys a gun. He goes to see his wife's lover. At his psychiatrist's he sees a watch: the one said to have been on Kennedy's wrist on the day he was assassinated. Samuel decides to steal it. The source is Jean-Paul Dubois's novel. In Sam Karmann's film Jean-Pierre Bacri plays Samuel and the part seems written for him; for years Bacri carried the same type in French cinema, the man who can manage nothing but being cantankerous and honest. Nicole Garcia is his wife. The mould is the midlife crisis comedy, but the film does not let the man off; the people around him are at least as much of a mess, and the question is not who is more in the right.