Just an Illusion (Juste Une Illusion)
Directors – Eric Toledano, Olivier Nakache – 2026 – France – Cert. 12a – 119m
***
The trials and tribulations of a young French teenager in the mid 1980s – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 11th
1985. 13-year-old Vincent Dayan (Simon Boubill) is fed up with living at home with his elder brother Arnaud (Alexis Rosenstiehl) who loves listening to new wave music while Vincent prefers funk. Vincent wants his own room, because he can’t do his homework in there with Arnaud playing his music, and Arnaud doesn’t want him putting up his own music posters. The two brothers can be fighting tooth and nail one minute, and relaxing together the next.
Vincent is also fed up with the constant arguing of their parents Sandrine (Camille Cottin from House of Gucci, Ridley Scott, 2021; Call My Agent!, TV series, 2015-2020; Allied, Robert Zemeckis, 2017) and Yves (Louis Garrel from Little Women, Greta Gerwig, 2019; Redoutable, Michael Hazanavicius, 2017; The Dreamers, Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003).
Dad has a run in with neighbour and car park attendant Berger (Pierre Lottin from The Stranger, 2025; When Autumn Falls, 2024, By the Grace of God, 2018; all François Ozon) when he discovers he’s lost his cherished no. 26 spot for no. 38, where he’s in danger of scratching one side of the car on a wall and his car sitting under a tree where birds poop. Dad always addresses Berger by surname and ticks him off for referring to his wife as Sandrine not Mme. Dayan. Still, dad has a well-paid job as a company exec and, as if that wasn’t enough, mum, spurred on by the emerging feminist zeitgeist, is doing a computer course to improve her career prospects. When the computer arrives from the office, Berger comes round to help put it all together.
There are secrets. Mum is concerned after finding an envelope of banknotes in his room that the elder son is dealing drugs, but it turns out, when she sends dad in to question him, that he’s making money out of recordings of highly sought-after music gigs, a lucrative earner. Supposed to reprimand him, dad starts borrowing money off his son, covering the amount with cheques. One day Vincent is on a bus in the daytime and spots his dad, supposed to be at work, sitting in a local cafe. As his brother explains, dad has lost his job but hasn’t managed to tell his family about it yet.
Meanwhile, Vincent and his three peers Thierry (Lilian Wallet), Nino Bernini (Samuel Maïmoun), and Oussman (Demba Diaw), from the housing estate on which they all live, head down to the video store where, under cover of renting movie classics, they hire (with some difficultly with the lady video store assistant) porno movie La Ruée vers Laure (The Gold Bush). (Continuity note; the only film with this title listed on the IMDb is from 1996.)
The plan is to watch it at the Berninis while Nino’s mother is out for a few hours, but when she comes back unexpectedly, the boys, in one of the few funny scenes that plays as such to an English audience, swiftly swap it for A Man and a Woman (Claude Lelouch, 1966). This being one of her favourite movies, with its instantly recognisable score, the four boys are trapped with her on the sofa watching the rest of this film, which wasn’t quite what they originally had in mind.
The task of keeping their copy of The Gold Bush safe falls to Vincent, who hides it in his chess set only to later discover that his dad has loaned it to their rabbi. The get it back, Vincent pretends to be grappling with the big existential issues of life, for which a discussion with the rabbi is merited; when they go round there and he has the chance to surreptitiously search the place, he can’t find the chess set anywhere…
Elsewhere, Vincent is required to to a joint homework project with Anne-Karine Duchesnay (Jeanne Lamartine), the girl in class on whom he has a crush but, he discovers when he overhears her on the phone in her house, holds him in low regard and they end up at her direction doing their own half of the project each, separately.
Vincent’s part of the project involves telling the story behind the famous photograph of President Mitterand and Chancellor Kohl holding hands, and he foolishly accepts his elder brother’s explanation that this was the two great leaders coming out as gay, a misrepresentation which gets Vincent, the girl, and their parents summoned to the principal’s office.
After this, when ever he attempts to phone Anne-Karine, he can’t get past her dad who wants the boy to have nothing to do with his daughter…
You can probably tell from the above that the film delivers a multiplicity of storylines, starting some of them off and then moving on to others, so that the whole thing feels like about twenty different movies, maybe half a dozen or so could have been about the 13-year-old boy.
For the first twenty or so minutes, the boy is indeed the central character, but then the piece loses focus as it jumps around from this storyline to that, half-heartedly attempting to make first the mother then the father the central character without ever fully taking us inside either of their worlds.
After that, the film seems to fall apart under its weight of it’s multiple storylines as it fails to develop any of them enough to be really satisfying. I’d pretty much given up on it, but then the final 40 or so minutes unexpectedly picks up as the film appears to find its focus again, homing in on the teenage romance story.
The soundtrack contains a highly eclectic mixture of 1980s and earlier pop music, including new wave artists The Cure and Joy Division, and funk artists Imagination (who supply the title track) and Earth Wind and Fire, as well as the theme from A Man and a Woman. There’s also a curious sequence in which Vincent is picturing Anne-Karine which starts off with the Kelsey Lu cover version of I’m Not in Love before cutting halfway though into the stunning and innovative 1975 10cc original. However, for this writer, all these were upstaged by some fantastic incidental scoring by contemporary Manchester jazz trio GoGo Penguin.
The film was one of France’s top home-grown movies this year, perhaps because it taps into French sensibilities, yet for this British writer, it felt like a film which couldn’t make up its mind as to the central character or properly develop any one of its myriad, underdeveloped plot lines. And if it’s supposed to be a comedy, although there are a few laughs here and there, it’s charming rather than funny.
Just an Illusion is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 11th.
Trailer: