‘My New Friends’ Review: Isabelle Huppert Headlines Andre Techine’s Unconvincing Social Drama

The road to bad movies is often paved with good intentions, and that’s unfortunately the case with My New Friends (Les Gens d’à côté), a sappy social drama from seasoned French director André Téchiné.

Starring Isabelle Huppert as a grieving cop who finds herself living next door to an anti-police activist, the film tells a worthy and timely story, but strains credulity from the get-go and never manages to win us over.

Téchiné, who’s now 80, has had some hits and misses in his long career, which includes a string of arthouse successes from the 1990s (My Favorite Season, Wild Reeds and Thieves) that turned him into an esteemed international auteur. His most memorable recent work was the beautifully acted gay teen drama Being 17, which premiered in Berlin back in 2016. The three features he’s made since then have been less impressive.

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On paper, My New Friends, which the director co-wrote with Régis de Martrin-Donos, has a decent setup: Forensics officer Lucie (Huppert) is still getting over the suicide of fellow cop Slimane (Moustapha Mbengue), with whom she’d built a long professional and private life in a sleepy suburb of southwest France. Back on the job but unable to cope, Lucie attends rallies supporting police victims like Slimane, while otherwise keeping to herself as she continues to mourn his loss.

That all changes when a new family moves into the house next door. The mother, Julia (Hafsia Herzi), is a warm and giving teacher trying her best to care for a young daughter, Rose (Romane Meunier), who has a tendency to stray away from home. The father, Yann (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), is a loving dad and talented artist, but — and it’s a big but — he’s also a committed black bloc activist who clashes with police at protests and is under regular governmental surveillance.

Lucie quickly warms up to her neighbors, babysitting for Rose and offering the couple gardening tips. When she leans about Yann’s political vocations, she decides to hide the fact that she’s a cop. Like many things in My New Friends, this seems like a stretch. Wouldn’t the other neighbors know about her job and talk about it? Wouldn’t they see her driving home from work with a gun and badge? And what about her dead husband, who was also a cop and whose pictures line the walls of Lucie’s house?

Most of the drama hinges on that secret, until Yann gets into big trouble with his fellow activists and Lucie decides to help him out. But even that brings little tension to a movie that lacks both suspense and logic, with Téchiné resorting to voiceover to explain Lucie’s intentions when they’re not entirely clear or believable. He also rather cheesily has the dead Slimane returning in the form of a ghost, playing piano in the house at night as Lucie silently looks on.

Huppert is usually the best thing about the movies she stars in, but her performance here seems as muddled as her character, and there’s never a moment where she comes across credibly as a cop (the extent of Lucie’s police work is taking photos of a single suspect). Herzi and Pérez Biscayart fare better, although the couple tends to express every thought aloud, in a heavy-handed scenario that often feels closer to that of a TV movie.

Even technically, the film appears to be haphazardly assembled, with shaky handheld photography and editing that seems too truncated (the running time without credits is just over 80 minutes). Téchiné’s other movies have featured some breathtaking moments, especially when he sets them amid the languishing beauty of the French countryside. Here the directing is serviceable at best, and the result never looks pretty.

My New Friends does tackle some interesting issues, whether its professional versus personal commitments, conflicting political beliefs, or dealing with trauma and loss, but it fails to treat any of them convincingly. This includes an epilogue that feels, no pun intended, like a total cop-out. It’s as if Téchiné lacked the convictions his characters were meant to have, which may help explain why his latest film definitely means well but winds up playing quite badly.