Je ne suis pas un salaud (2015)

Here is a film where I feel the choice of title paints a markedly different picture of how you might expect things to turn out. In English they, somewhat inexplicably, decided to go with A Decent Man which I feel pales in comparison to the original French - je ne suis pas un salaud; literally I am not a bastard. There is something orders of magnitude colder and harsher about that one, much more fitting for the tone of the film. That is to say, this is unrelentingly bleak, about as far removed from the oft-stereotyped romantic image of France as you can imagine. Main man, Nicolas Duvauchelle, is one to watch out for in French cinema in the future. He is a coiled spring, a fearsome performance as the tense and unstable Eddy, increasingly gaunt and dead-eyed as his life spirals further and further out of control. This is audio-visual sandpaper, there can be no happy ending here.