Rock 'n Roll
by Kathryn Loggins

A film by Guillaume Canet

This charming and quirky French comedy by Guillaume Canet (Love Me If You Dare) takes the classic mid-life crisis tropes to a whole new level. The film starts Canet, as himself, alongside his real life partner Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose, The Dark Knight Rises). These two wonderful actors play satirical versions of themselves. Canet is an aging actor that continues to lose his roles to younger men, while Cotillard is the hot Award-winning method actor, who keeps stealing her partner’s thunder. In order for Canet to stay relevant he makes extreme choices that end up putting his career, friendships and family to the test.

Canet said in an interview about Rock’n Roll that he wanted to make a movie about “celebrity and the public’s view of famous people - a kind of mockumentary about a celebrity whose real life was light years from people’s fantasized version of it”. He ended up scrapping that idea, but the theme of how the public perceives celebrities plays a strong part in this film. He goes on to say, ”I wanted it to be a comedy with depth, that captures for instance the excessive, absolute ageism that runs the world today.” And in the film we see Canet dealing with exactly these themes of getting older in the public eye and realizing that he’s just not “rock’n roll” anymore. How he goes about finding himself again takes a depressing, but amusing turn..

Ultimately, it’s a darkly funny exploration of who we think we are versus how we are perceived. Without spoiling the ending of the movie, I’ll say that it was hard to watch at times, but left me with a beautiful sense of hope that all of us deserve to be loved for who we truly are and not how people think we are.