Arnaud Desplechin adapts Philip Roth: this would be enough to arouse great curiosity around “Tromperie”, the absolute star of the weekend at the cinema.
Presented at the Cannes Film Festival 2021, the film focuses on the relationship between the writer Philip and his mistress, who often manages to reach him in the usual place, in his studio, a perfect love nest, above all because it is far from prying eyes. their meetings, the two behave like any other couple, going from passionate moments to more quarrelsome ones and discussing everything: from women to sex, from mutual fidelity to anti-Semitism, from literature to death.
Based on the novel “Inganno”
Based on the 1990 novel “Inganno”, “Tromperie” is a film in which Desplechin remains faithful to the spirit of Roth, while at the same time managing to give life to a deeply personal film focused on themes that the French director has often dealt with in past: from the relationship between reality and lies to the swing of feelings that often affects a couple.
Mixing almost surreal flashes with far more conventional passages, Desplechin signs a bold and far from simple transposition, starting from a narrative material also focused on literary autobiography and the difficulty of trying to tell oneself through art.
A film of great dialogue
If the mise-en-scène is already elegant and refined in itself, the dialogues of a very dense script, rich in words, without ever being cloying or redundant, are equally significant. ‘together it is always cohesive and coherent at the right point, also thanks to the excellent performance of the two protagonists: Denis Podalydès, who returns to work with Desplechin twenty-five years after “Comment je me suis disputé … (ma vie sexuelle)”, and an increasingly talented Léa Seydoux, who confirms herself as one of the fittest actresses in contemporary cinema after the equally excellent performance in Bruno Dumont’s “France” (another film presented on the Croisette).