À cause des filles..?

Pascal Thomas was always a special figure in the landscape of French post-Nouvelle Vague cinema: an auteur apart who cultivated an aesthetic close to that of classical Hollywood cinema – its industrial, craftsmanslike essence whose sense of unhurried discretion he venerated in a highly self-conscious fashion – resulting in an art that felt out of time in a benignly subversive way.

It certainly speaks in favour of French audiences that they embraced Thomas and made him, for all his career ups-and-downs (including two long periods of silence), one of the nation’s cherished popular auteurs. In its relaxedly cultivated, airy, unhurried, benign, modest and zephyr-like way, À cause des filles..? feels a bit like a sum total of Thomas’s cinema: guests at a wedding party gone south mingle by the beach and tell each other stories about past follies of desire and love, some of which are droll and others sad but funny, some poignant and others erratic…

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