A debt counselor in the movie A Difficult Year, directed by Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, which opened around Israel on Thursday, tells his support group members to ask themselves three questions before they make any new purchase: Do I need this? Do I really need this? Do I need this now?
If moviegoers were to ask these questions, the answer to all of them is yes: This is the movie we really need, right now.
Toledano and Nakache, two French-Jewish directors who are friends and have been directing together for nearly 30 years, are best known for their movie The Intouchables (2011). One of the most successful French movies of all time, it told the story of a newly disabled man and his young caregiver. Their movies are always a blend of comedy and drama, and you often don’t know if you will laugh or cry when a scene begins, which makes their work interesting. Their understanding of how close sorrow and joy can be was very much in evidence in their 2019 movie, The Specials, which is the best movie I’ve ever seen about autism (and it’s a subject with which I have firsthand experience).
What is A Difficult Year about?
A Difficult Year opens with a very funny prologue – how many movies actually make you laugh in the first 30 seconds? – and goes on to tell a story about two down-on-their-luck Parisian guys who get involved with a climate activist group, and it satirizes left-wing politics and the society that the activists criticize in equal measure. But it is squarely focused on its characters.
Albert (Pio Marmai) is a baggage handler at the airport who earns minimum wage and has gotten mired in debt. He sleeps at the airport and spends his time running schemes to try to make some cash, like selling repackaged perfume that people boarding planes are forced to discard.
On Black Friday, he gets upset when the climate/anti-consumerism group blocks the way into an appliance store, where he hopes to get a cheap flat-screen TV that he can resell for a quick profit. The group, whose members have all taken on pseudonyms, is led by a beautiful, charismatic woman who calls herself Cactus (Noemi Merlant), and is aided by Quinoa (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet), her loyal deputy.
After Albert finally manages to get into the store – the sequence of buyers fighting each other over the appliances is staged as a darkly comic ballet – he goes to sell the TV he buys to Bruno (Jonathan Cohen). It turns out that Bruno is in as much debt as Albert, and is depressed and suicidal to boot. The two become friends, and Albert joins the debtors’ support group that Bruno belongs to, where he meets the leader, Henri (Mathieu Amalric). Henri knows legal ways for them to get some debt relief, but as helpful as he is, he has his own problems, but no spoilers here.
The world of the hopelessly indebted is deftly portrayed. If you are lucky enough never to have been in that situation, you may learn a bit here about how ordinary people who can barely make ends meet may get in trouble by taking out easy-to-obtain, high-interest loans, and about how deeply they can feel shame over their predicament.
When Albert and Bruno discover that a climate change group offers free beer and snacks, they head to a meeting, and it turns out to be the same organization that blocked the appliance store that Albert went to. At first, it all seems like nonsense to them, and while they maintain a sense of skepticism, they begin to be drawn into the group’s activities. The activists are a mostly privileged group, the movie intimates, and due to their brashness and street smarts, Albert and Bruno become the organization’s most effective members at protests.
The movie makes fun of its two sad-sack heroes as they go house to house in wealthy neighborhoods, encouraging residents to give away their possessions, which they turn around and sell. The movie lampoons the clueless rich people; the dogmatic Cactus, who lives in a large but empty apartment, clearly a child of privilege, who feels superior to the wealthy and is proud of herself for staying out of relationships (much to the dismay of Albert, Bruno, and Quinoa); and these two hustlers who try to take advantage of everybody. But Cactus is so purehearted that you may gradually begin to admire her, and all the facts she and the others highlight about climate change are very real.
TOLEDANO AND Nakache have pulled off a very difficult feat in this movie: They have dramatized the true dilemma that is at the heart of the climate-change movement and the resistance to it. When you don’t have enough money to pay your bills, when you get deeper into debt every day, you can’t think about the future very seriously. But people like Cactus and Quinoa can’t seem to understand that, and they don’t know how to get through to the majority of people who are struggling, and often alienate them with their strident rhetoric.
There is a lot going on in the movie, and at times it loses focus, as if the directors couldn’t decide how much they wanted to tell jokes, and how much they really care about the social issues they raise. But by showcasing the problems of the climate-change movement in a comedy, they will likely do more to get people to think seriously about the issue than many far more earnest films.
The actors, especially Marmai and Cohen, work well together and create extremely likable characters, for whom the directors clearly feel a great deal of affection. At times, A Difficult Year reminded me of two of Francois Truffaut’s comedies about the Antoine Doinel character, Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board, which follow the confused hero as he tries to make his way in the world. Unless people have a roof over their heads, and love, both Truffaut and the directors of A Difficult Year seem to be saying, they can’t look for anything else.
While this won’t be important to international audiences, it’s worth noting that Toledano and Nakache made a brief visit to Israel in late 2023 to screen the film for evacuees in Tel Aviv, and made opening remarks that combined gentle humor with real concern. Since we are now experiencing a truly difficult year, it’s nice to have a movie like this to help us get through it. And don’t leave as soon as the credits start, since the directors have saved some of the best jokes for last.