Pas de scandale

Perhaps the most perfectly nuanced film Jacquot has ever made. The story works in the time-honoured tradition of Tennyson's Enoch Arden. Fabrice Luchini's businessman Grégoire has just done an undeserved stretch in the penitentiary for some sordid white collar family business, but given his new-found hyper-awareness of the world and the way his wife (Huppert) and brother (Lindon) tiptoe around him, he might as well be returning from the dead. Pas de scandale hides the particulars of many of its plot entanglements in order to concentrate on the complex emotions entangling its characters. Jacquot and his actors - the normally puckish Luchini giving an absolutely luminous performance; the bull-necked Lindon as his newscaster sibling, as touching a figure as he is comical; the majestically controlled Huppert as Grégoire's quietly judgmental wife - they all weave a unique spell of enchantment over this film, which begins as a kind of comically tinged melodrama and ends as a family romance. (KJ)