Little White Lies (2010)

Jean-Louis: You spent 2 weeks lying to each other. You earn your living from it. You made it an art.......Worst of all, you lie to yourselves. Every single one of you. You buy into each other's lies. Call yourselves friends? What's friendship? Leaving a pal in the hospital 'cause your vacation matters more?

It was hard to get started with Little White Lies, specially since the initial 15 minutes seemed like it was going nowhere. Well, at the end of two and a half hours, it tries to pack a punch as it sets out to expose all relationships in today's world as superficial and fake.

Every year Max (Francois Cluzet) helps to organize a vacation for his group of friends. Only this time it's different as Ludo (Jean Dujardin) finds himself in intensive care unit after a near-fatal accident. Marie (Marion Cotillard) is the only one in the group who feels they should all stick with Ludo and cancel the vacation. However, the rest feel that even though they feel for his condition, there's not much they can do about it. Max tries to take on the act of the care-taker of the group and keeps losing it at every little imperfection at his holiday farm, be it the noisy weasels or the overgrown lawn grass. The issue with Max seems to have been aggravated after Vincent (Benoit Magimel) confesses his love for Max even when he is married with children and claims he is not "a queer".

Marie was once with Ludo and now currently seeing another musician, even though she is in only for the sex and not anything beyond that. As she moves around and never is in at a particular place for long, she finds it difficult to commit in a relationship. We see Eric (Gilles Lellouche) has a thing for Marie, though he is still hung up on Lea after being dumped by her. While at one of the dinners, Marie confesses if Vincent weren't married, she probably would have fallen for him. Most of the times we witness each of the character's inner conflicts in his or her relationships, though they don't really seem to threaten the bonds - even though superficial - in the group.

Overall it's a light-hearted movie from director, Guillaume Canet, who has given us a much more absorbing, fast-paced thriller, Tell No One, with actor Francois Cluzet. Given his previous movie, it was natural to expect more out of him while this one ends up as a little preachy.

Rating - 7/10