“It’s up to you, Chéri” in the cinema – Always stay friendly!

Marriage dramas used to be real dramas – think of Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage”. Or even biting comedies like “Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife” by Ernst Lubitsch. Today they are often neither one nor the other, but merely well-intentioned.

Perhaps director Florent Bernard is simply too young for the film “It’s up to you, Chéri,” about the stress break in a marriage after more than 20 years. After all, he himself is only 33, which is the age at which many people start to think about whether they should commit themselves more tightly or not. Most of the time they don’t know, and watching this endless hesitation isn’t very entertaining.

But one person here knows exactly what she doesn’t want: Charlotte Gainsbourg as her long-time wife Sandrine doesn’t want things to continue as before in her marriage to Christophe (truly rough: José Garcia). She has made the decision to separate from Christophe, the father of her two almost grown children, who will soon be leaving home to study.

Not that there was any tangible reason for the breakup. He is not violent, drinks, or has any other circumstances. He works in a car rental company, which has almost proletarian characteristics in the otherwise middle-class French relationship crisis cinema. Sandrine is also a simple employee in a travel agency (does that still exist?). So neither of them are obsessively obsessed with their work, but rather happy when they get home after work. Actually, she could connect the dots. But Sandrine has discovered that she no longer loves Christophe. She doesn’t mean the romantic love of the beginning, but the simple fact that she feels better alone than with her husband. Is that a sufficient reason for separation?

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But one thing is found: Christophe never listens to his cell phone’s mailbox, and so he regularly misses the little orders she leaves him. Sometimes there is actually no food left for the fish in the aquarium. Can this be fixed? With good will, of course, but Sandrine no longer has any good will for Christoph. She can’t really blame him for anything; But she can’t imagine living with him for the next 20 years either. She wants to live alone from now on.

First she asks her two children, Bastian and Lorelei, whether they would agree if she moved out. The two of them don’t seem to care and shrug their shoulders. Yeah, sure, no drama. Wouldn’t this be the moment to take a critical look at the dispassion and omnipresent apathy that prevails here? What’s wrong with a society in which people no longer seriously clash with each other, but simply let long-standing relationships fall asleep out of sheer lack of interest in each other? And Christophe is certainly not the only one to blame here.

For him it’s a drama; he no longer understands the world. What did he do wrong, what should suddenly be the reason for the breakup, a simple: I don’t like it anymore? He cannot accept this and decides to save his marriage and thus his family. He forces her to spend a weekend with him visiting the places that played a role in their shared history. Of course, it’s a vain labor of love, and at this point you start to feel sorry for Christophe. He has no chance, but doesn’t know it.

The search for lost time can connect or divide.

To stage this kind of marital sadness in such a way that the viewer still remains internally involved would require the director to have a psychological sense of time, which he probably doesn’t have (yet) because of his youth. So he makes the mistake of ignoring the idleness of a relationship, the torture of passing time that is no longer shared. Instead, he makes a comedy with nothing but clumsy slapstick – much to the resistance of leading actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. She plays Sandrine without any big gestures or outbursts as a middle-aged woman who only knows what she doesn’t want, but not what she does want. First she has to be by herself, then maybe she can figure it out in the time she has left.

It’s a shame that the potential of an actress like Charlotte Gainsbourg can hardly be developed here. After all, it impressed itself on us in Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” and “Nymphomaniac” with characters driven by demons.

The search for lost time can connect or divide. A latent panic pushes Sandrine to make a decision that no one knows whether it will keep its promises. This uncertainty could be the dramatic focus of this film, but instead it gets lost in all the niceties. No, no one should be left here injured. So they smile and wave at each other in a very friendly manner as Sandrine ends up driving her little moving van herself wherever she goes. Not a broken leg, but nothing other than the path to self-realization that everyone should take?

That’s a good thing!, says director Florent Bernard, who likes to call himself FloBert, probably because he likes the Flaubert association. But he is not a Flaubert, because he plumbed the depths of loneliness, fear and drive behind the laboriously maintained bourgeois façade. This often only requires a few small strokes and hints.

Charlotte Gainsbourg – with growing resignation to her role – tries to express exactly this in her acting: a vague unease that she herself cannot name but also no longer wants to ignore. Charlotte Gainsbourg in “It’s up to you, Chéri” (what an infantile film title!) is like Sandrine in her marriage: she radios SOS in vain because there is simply no receiver for this signal here. And so, in the end, the actors and the audience drift together, united in insignificance, in the sea of ​​the zeitgeist.

“It’s up to you, Chéri”, France 2024. Directed and written by Florent Bernard. Starring: Charlotte Gainsbourg, José Garcia, Lily Aubry, Hadrien Heaulmé. 102 min. Release date: December 19th.

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