Je règle mon pas sur le pas de mon père

... of whom I'm definitely one. If those superb oily jowls are covered with a grey beard now, I don't mind. He's the last representative of la France profonde (remember him as the butcher in Chabrol's Le Boucher?), and when he goes, so will go a certain ugly truth in French cinema. We see rural land being swallowed up by big-box warehouse stores, gas stations and highways. Yanne makes his way through this wasteland, just as cruelly irresponsible as you could wish, a rat among rats, as he teaches his unwanted son the rules of grifting.

I really wanted to see Laurence Côte after her astonishing role in Les Voleurs, where she was one of the great love objects in recent film history. I didn't find her part well developed; it's sort of a plot mechanism for Canet to assert himself with his father.