home


HUNTING AND GATHERING
Hunting and Gathering
When Camille moves in with the Parisian odd-couple, a grumpy chef and a would-be actor, life gets more complicated for everyone. score

3+
moviereview rates films from
1 (unwatchable) to 5 (unmissable)
FIND A MOVIEREVIEW
Cast
Audrey Tautou, Guillaume Canet, Laurent Stocker, François Bertin

Director
Claude Berri

Screenwriter
Claude Berri

Country
France (subtitles)

Rating / Running Time
M / 97 minutes

Australian Release
December 2007

Official Site





(c) moviereview 2006-2007
ABN 72 775 390 361

While some, much closer to the beating heart of French society, have written this off as neo-conservative proselytising (imagine a world in which hardworking white people live a happy life), Claude Berri’s latest box-office delight speaks to a much wider audience than his critics would admit. In many ways, this urban romantic-drama charts similar emotional landscape to his seminal Jean de Florette as it probes the price of apathy and cruelty.

Camille (Audrey Tautou) lives in a sprawling, Parisian apartment building. Making herself ill to pay the rent, she falls on the kindness of her neighbour, a fey, stuttering son of nobility who shares with an obnoxious, ill-tempered chef (Guillaume Canet). Franck takes an instant dislike to the invader amid concerns about his aged grandmother whom he’s recently put in a home. From here, the signposts are clearly laid out and indicate a recognisable conclusion. As the group forms a new family, we learn that Camille’s acid-tongued mother is irreparably disappointed in her daughter, and that Franck’s relationship with his own parents is non-existent. Not subplots, more background sketches that give the foreground greater dimension.

Yet to say that this turns Berri’s film into some conspiratorial pamphlet for a conservative wonderland, simply because he asks us to believe pleasant things can happen in the real world, says much more about his detractors than it does Berri himself. Truth is, Hunting And Gathering (originally and better titled Together, It’s Everything) is a small, sweet drama in which lonely people find a way to get a bit more out of life. Inspiring really. It may not shake your world, but it will certainly add something to it.

// COLIN FRASER