Rein­vent­ing Marvin

The charm­ing­ly monikered Finnegan Old­field has become some­thing of a plucky main­stay in French cin­e­ma, cul­ti­vat­ing a small monop­oly on angu­lar young man roles. He’s orig­i­nal­ly from Lewes in Eng­land, and there’s always a light anglophile twang to his into­na­tion of dia­logue. And, his uptight act­ing style feels a lit­tle more British than the louche, relaxed con­ti­nen­tal style.

In Anne Fontaine’s Rein­vent­ing Mar­vin, he plays a young boy brought up in hard­scrab­ble pover­ty, bul­lied by his peers and utter­ly ashamed of his hay­seed in-laws. He plays Mar­vin Bijoux, a clos­et­ed kid who is unable to express his true feel­ings in this volatile social milieu. The film adopts a flash­back struc­ture which places Marvin’s painful for­ma­tive strug­gles against his even­tu­al move to Paris where he now glad-hands (and more) with suave, sex­u­al­ly flu­id elites in shark skin suits. But it’s not a case of sev­er­ing ties with his past – he wants to pre­serve his upbring­ing and make light of how his ear­ly anx­i­eties helped to colour his lat­er enlightenment.

The film is loose­ly adapt­ed from Edouard Louis’ pop­u­lar 2014 mem­oir, ​‘The End of Eddie’, though it takes some lib­er­ties with both the time­line and details. Fontaine over­loads the sto­ry with ambi­ent longueurs and pro­tract­ed scenes of over­stat­ed emo­tion. She lav­ish­es in the art of seduc­tion, to the point that the whole pre-coital rit­u­al appears a lit­tle dull. Old­field, alas, doesn’t real­ly pos­sess the elec­tric­i­ty to keep the lights on, and while Marvin’s jour­ney cer­tain­ly feels like it could be high­ly edu­ca­tion­al for young, curi­ous view­ers, it also laps­es into maudlin sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty by the lat­ter reels.

Isabelle Hup­pert turns up for an extend­ed cameo as her­self, join­ing Mar­vin on stage for his exper­i­men­tal, self-reflex­ive per­for­mance piece, but unfor­tu­nate­ly the film takes great pains to tie up all the loose ends, and so long out­stays its welcome.