SFFS Screening: Change of Plans September 10, 2010

Danièle Thompson (Jet Lag, SFIFF 2003) returns with another glistening example of the brand of choral comedy she has perfected. A group of friends and acquaintances gather for dinner, and the atmosphere couldn’t be friendlier—with great food, wine and conversation on hand. Slowly the masks of civility drop and suspicions, jealousies and fears emerge. Darker in tone than Thompson’s earlier work, Change of Plans still features her knowing and generous wit. As always, she has gathered a first-rate cast: Karin Viard, Patrick Bruel, Patrick Chesnais, Marina Hands, Dany Boon, Marina Foïs, Emmanuelle Seigner and Pierre Arditi. The seamlessness of their performances is a tribute not only to Thompson’s script, cowritten with her son Christopher, who appears in the film, but also to her very precise orchestration of the action as disparate characters and stories come together. As in her earlier films, Thompson returns to using shared spaces as ways to explore the banalities and transformative junctures of everyday life. With Change of Plans, she inverts the notion of bourgeois complacency, where the notion of settled lives at fortysomething collides with the reality of life-altering changes, mortality, new love and self-discovery. —Rendezvous with French Cinema, 2009

Written by Danièle Thompson, Christopher Thompson. Photographed by Jean-Marc Fabre. With Karin Viard, Dany Boon, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marina Hands. (100 min, IFC).

More information available at http://www.sffs.org/content.aspx?catid=8&pageid=1794&TitleId=screen-changeofplans

Official Website: http://www.sffs.org/content.aspx?catid=8&pageid=1794&TitleId=screen-changeofplans