[Rating:3.5/5]
“Everyone pretends they’re fine.” So says one of the characters toward the end of Danièle Thompson’s new ensemble comedy Change of Plans. It’s not a particularly profound statement or one that can’t be found in plenty of other movies, but it does describe pretty accurately the state of affairs among the characters in the film. They first meet attending a dinner party put on by Marie-Laurence (nicknamed ML) and Piotr, a married couple struggling a bit with their marriage. The other guests include ML’s sister and her new beau, a potential new boss, some old friends, and a flamenco teacher – in other words, various backgrounds, degrees of connection to ML and Piotr, and a wide range of intimacy with them.
As they gather for dinner, it becomes clear that potential boss Lucas and his wife Sarah are very not happy together, that friend Melanie is about to leave her husband Alain, that one of the guests has had an affair with ML, and that sister Juliette’s new beau is as old as their father – who, by the way, drops by nearly unannounced, much to Juliette’s chagrin. She hasn’t spoken to him for years. The dinner party continues, focusing on building character, relationships, and drama through dialogue. Dialogue which both hides and reveals each character’s unhappiness, joy, and desire – the ways they’re pretending to be fine and the ways they really are not.
About half-way through, the film jumps forward a year – ML is planning another party and trying to get the same group together again. Many things have changed, others haven’t, and as the film continues, it jumps back and forth between the two time periods, gradually revealing how circumstances have changed in between. It’s quite a good structural device, allowing us to adjust our point of view on the earlier dinner party as more things are revealed from the future time period, while also encouraging us to care about the changes that have happened to the characters we’ve come to know from the first half of the film.
There’s a lot to like about the film, especially if you like almost comedy-of-manners sort of films, built on dialogue and small character reveals rather than overt drama or major events. There are a few big dramatic events, but most of them – a car accident that affects one character for the second half of the film, the events that drove Juliette and her father apart, etc. – occur offscreen and are talked about rather than seen. It’s tough to make that effective, but Thompson (and her son Christopher, the screenwriter) do a fine job of keeping interest up without straying far from their chosen mode of subtle conversational development.
I’ve actually warmed to the film a little since seeing it, but though I enjoyed its quiet way of going about its story and appreciate that style in comparison to so many films’ dependence on bombast, it still strikes me as not particularly memorable over the long run. Which is pretty much how I feel about Thompson’s earlier film Avenue Montaigne, which I quite enjoyed and generally recommend to people who enjoy cute, meandering ensemble films with a French sensibility, but of which I remember very little actual plot or character points. They’re nice films, but they don’t really grab you in any lasting way, which I think is due more to the fact that they kind of just stop without giving you any feeling of insight (I do not mean a message or a “point”, just to be clear – I mean some sense that you’ve felt or understood something, even something that you can’t put into words, that you hadn’t before) out of all these people’s lives.
So it’s a good film, and one that certainly you’ll enjoy if you like films of this sort, and that’s about as far as it goes. I won’t say it left me unsatisfied, because that’s about what I expected, but I feel that Thompson and Thompson are quite good at weaving ensembles together and at writing dialogue-heavy scenes that work, and I feel like they could create something profound if they’d push things a little further and go for real depth instead of superficial metaphors.
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