Meet The Leroys
Sandrine Leroy tells her husband Christophe that she wants a divorce. Their children—now teenagers—don’t seem too shaken: just enough time to make their mother realize that life can take on new trajectories. Christophe, in a final romantic impulse, decides to orchestrate a traveling weekend through the places dear to the family’s history, in an attempt to mend what may be merely worn out, rather than broken.
Love is blind, but marriage restores sight.
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
The story highlights how the distance between two spouses (or between parents and children) does not stem from great dramas, but from an accumulation of silences, small omissions, subtle misunderstandings. That is where Leroy works best: in the unspoken gaps, not in the explosions. The journey through emblematic places of family life is an effective narrative device. It brings out shared memories, unextinguished nostalgia, and perceptible regrets.
Within this weave, moments of lightness emerge, punctuated by ironic squabbles or fleeting comic suspensions which, while never undermining the gravity of the theme, ease its emotional burden. However, the narrative core—the family on the verge of breaking apart, with an attempt to save it over the course of a weekend—belongs to a constellation of cinematic déjà vus. The Leroy family does not always manage to reinvent the formula: it often settles into predictability, embracing a reassuring, almost pacified register.
The calibration of conflicts and the measurement of emotions yield a construction that borders on sterility. On one hand, the refusal of redundant melodrama is commendable; on the other, the “laboratory” perfection sacrifices precisely that imperfection which makes reality tangible and vulnerable. The rhythm stretches out, introspective sequences last longer than necessary, and the expectation of an unforeseen revelation dissolves into a predictable narrative progression.
The result is an elegant, well-acted film that does not aspire to rewrite the coordinates of French family comedy, but rather to offer an intimate and self-aware declination: a tender portrait of what happens when love ceases to be a given and once again demands attention. There is a sense of homely familiarity—like the scent of one’s childhood home, only slightly altered by rearranged furniture, domesticated conflicts, and polite smiles.
Yet, beyond a few amusing moments, the work remains trapped in its own programmatic design: a narrative mechanism that proceeds on autopilot, more interested in reassuring than unsettling, more inclined to smooth out than to take risks. What emerges is a cinema that is clean, courteous, but devoid of that creative gesture capable of piercing the viewer, of exposing them to a fertile imperfection. A film that caresses, but rarely wounds: yet another variation on the theme, polite, polished, but unable to turn the ordinary into an experience.
Within this weave, moments of lightness emerge, punctuated by ironic squabbles or fleeting comic suspensions which, while never undermining the gravity of the theme, ease its emotional burden. However, the narrative core—the family on the verge of breaking apart, with an attempt to save it over the course of a weekend—belongs to a constellation of cinematic déjà vus. The Leroy family does not always manage to reinvent the formula: it often settles into predictability, embracing a reassuring, almost pacified register.
The calibration of conflicts and the measurement of emotions yield a construction that borders on sterility. On one hand, the refusal of redundant melodrama is commendable; on the other, the “laboratory” perfection sacrifices precisely that imperfection which makes reality tangible and vulnerable. The rhythm stretches out, introspective sequences last longer than necessary, and the expectation of an unforeseen revelation dissolves into a predictable narrative progression.
The result is an elegant, well-acted film that does not aspire to rewrite the coordinates of French family comedy, but rather to offer an intimate and self-aware declination: a tender portrait of what happens when love ceases to be a given and once again demands attention. There is a sense of homely familiarity—like the scent of one’s childhood home, only slightly altered by rearranged furniture, domesticated conflicts, and polite smiles.
Yet, beyond a few amusing moments, the work remains trapped in its own programmatic design: a narrative mechanism that proceeds on autopilot, more interested in reassuring than unsettling, more inclined to smooth out than to take risks. What emerges is a cinema that is clean, courteous, but devoid of that creative gesture capable of piercing the viewer, of exposing them to a fertile imperfection. A film that caresses, but rarely wounds: yet another variation on the theme, polite, polished, but unable to turn the ordinary into an experience.
Marriage is the main cause of divorce.
— Groucho Marx
— Groucho Marx