So my second French film starring Juliette Binoche seen at my arthouse in Wolverhampton in 3 days - I don't know whether I love the implications of that sentence or hate them 
. This one is directed by Olivier Assayas (the former Mr. Maggie Cheung) who is one of the most diverse and versatile filmmakers in Europe at the moment (his previous four movies were a period drama, a techno thriller, a drug film and an action film). This is much more in the classical, smooth vein of Les destinées sentimentales (but without the period setting), which is only a good thing as that is an incredibly underpraised, obscure (in this country) gem of a film.
The story here is how three siblings (Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche and Jérémie Renier) divide up their inheritance, which consists of numerous valuable paintings, furniture and pottery collected by their mother from her famous artist-uncle (I've heard the wonderful Wendy Ide in The Times describe this as "Possibly the most bourgeois film ever made" and you can see where she's coming from), as well as more symbolically the house where they spent their summers as children. The best thing about the film is Assayas's technique, at times it's quite phenomenal that you're sitting there and you've no idea if he's cut or not for the last 10 minutes - not that he does long takes but the fluidity of the camerawork combined with the editing is just seamlessly smooth.
The acting is uniformly fine, but Berling is the only one with anything approaching a full role. Binoche has one scene where she does one of the most difficult things an actress can do. I remember hearing someone talk about Martin Landau in Ed Wood saying that he wasn't doing a Hungarian accent for Bela Lugosi, rather the accent of a Hungarian person who was trying to hide it. It's standard for actors doing accents or crying and those things are showily impressive to the audience, but there is a scene in this film where Binoche's character is quite obviously trying *not* to cry and she succeeds in capturing that moment incredibly. You're not watching an actress turning on the waterworks, she's there in that moment actively trying not to, which serves her character perfectly as it's exactly what her character is going through.
Sadly though aside from the odd moment the acting all round doesn't do anything out of the ordinary - it doesn't need to, it's not that kind of film. The film is more of an essay on heritage, generation gaps and the place of art in modern society. Sounds like it's dealing with big subjects and it is, but not in a condescending or pretentious way as it's not ramming it down your throat, rather exploring the moral side of it all in a rather low-key way.
The film though for all it's technique does drag the longer it goes and it feels at least a half hour longer than its 100 minute running time as it gets stymied in all the legal wranglings vis-a-vis inheritance law. The acting isn't good enough to sustain an interest through this as there's very little the actors are asked to do, they do what they can when they're asked but it's not a performer's piece. I'm very unsure as to quite how much I liked this as to whether I think it's just decent or good (it's neither very good nor bad so it's somewhere inbetween), but either one of those adjectives is enough to recommend this film to fans of elegant French cinema or Juliette Binoche.