Macadam Stories

A housing block on the edge of Paris. The lift is broken and money has to be collected to fix it; a man called Sternkowitz refuses to pay and is barred from using it, so he starts going up and down the stairs at night. A retired actress moves into the same building. On another floor a woman lives alone and her son has gone. Then a NASA astronaut falls onto the roof. Samuel Benchetrit writes and directs, from his own book of stories. The cast includes Isabelle Huppert, Gustave Kervern, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Michael Pitt and Tassadit Mandi. The film is made of three stories, all set in the same building, and the characters barely see each other. The idea is mismatch. In each story two people come together with nothing in common: a man and a nurse, a teenager and a former actress, an Algerian mother and an American astronaut. The tone sits between dry comedy and sadness; Benchetrit holds the scenes long and does not point the jokes. The astronaut strand is the most cited; two people communicate without a shared language and the narrative never explains it. It screened out of competition at the 2015 Cannes film festival. Who it is for: viewers who like French episodic films and dry comic drama. Who it is not for: the three stories are of unequal strength, little happens, and the narrative arrives nowhere.