Charell is based on an episode in Patrick Modiani's novel De Si Braves Garçons (Such Fine Boys), a series of melancholy insights into the lives of the neglected boys of rich parents. In the novel they all went to an elite Parisian boarding school, the Valvert School for Boys, during or after the war.
Daniel (Jean-Michel Fête), a writer, and Alain Charell (Marc Barbé) recognise each other at a chance meeting 20 years afterwards.
The film keeps the setting in and around the empty night-time spaces of the Bois de Boulogne, so for example their chance meeting is at the Pavillon Dauphine rather than the Gare du Nord as in the novel. The characters too seem half asleep, anaesthetised by their disappointing lives.
There is something sleazy and melancholy about Charrell, and about the apartment he shows the narrator, where an unexplained girl Sonja lies asleep on the couch, and where a man and a woman are can be heard having sex in the next room.
Charell explains that he really lives in a better apartment with his wife Suzanne.
And yet when the man emerges from the next room, it becomes clear that the woman he has been with is - Suzanne. Charell has a conversation with the man, 'a friend', who leaves, and he runs a bath for his wife.
Daniel has dinner in the bigger apartment with a drunken, reminiscing Charell and Suzanne. As he is walking home, Charell draws up in a car with his wife and asks with him to go with them to the other apartment. Patrick refuses. He asks, what goes on there? We relax with friends, says Charelle. Suzanne sits like a zombie in the car. It doesn't seem like fun. It's a murky, languorous world.
A few days later Charell rings and pleads again. Daniel meets them in a late night brasserie, where Suzanne feels unwell. Is she on drugs? They sit on a bench. They look at a book Patrick has bought her about horses, a reminder of her happier days horse-riding in Neuilly, so different from the sleaze.
Walking again at night through the Bois, Daniel witnesses Charell being shot by someone in a car.
Patrick waits outside the hospital. The sleeping woman, Sonja, comes out. She has a note from Charell, a schoolboy note making light of what has happened.
Lost men, lost women. The film sets out to capture the malaise of Modiani's world.
I liked the understated acting in this from Fête and Barbé. Fête, polite, decent, his writing career less glorious than the one he would have hoped for; the dissolute Barbé, so close to admitting to his desperation, so nostalgic for the companionship of his old schoolfriend. There's an early role for Marie Kremer as the hotel receptionist, with her dreaming voice.
But there is also the remarkable presence of Anicée Alvina, still a beautiful actress but sadly close to her last year of life. Knowing this lends an extra poignancy to her illness in the film.
