The Friends

Philippe is an industrialist well on in years; his wife is confined to her bed and they have no children. As he prepares for a holiday by the sea he strikes up an acquaintance with Paul, a young man of the working class, and decides to bring him along. For Paul this is a first sight of how the other half lives: first class hotels, habits, ways of speaking. When he meets some wealthy young people at the resort he tries to pass as one of them and cannot carry it off. The film does not present the difference of class as a distance that can be closed; it shows where the imitation comes apart. The inequality beneath the relationship stays visible throughout. Philippe March plays the lead in Gerard Blain’s eighty eight minute French film, completed in 1971.