It's bad enough that some comedies haven't a good premise, it's worse when they have one and never get a handle on it.
"Second Life" had a concept and a terrific one but it turned it into one of these "vociferation contests" French cinema made a speciality of. Patrick Braoudé is a terrific thinker but not much of a materializer; he could have adopted a Capraeque tone with a touch of Allenian creativity to make a sort of French "Groundhog Day", instead he made a film that managed to be noisier than "The Visitors 2". I'm not lying, every single character shouts at some point of the film, as if there was a law about the impact of a line being proportional to its decibels. GET IT?
Still, what a concept! Imagine you're in your early thirties, your whole life ahead of you, and all of a sudden, you find yourself two decades later, with a spouse and kids that are perfect strangers to you, with more weight, becoming the bourgeois sellout you've always dreaded ... and all that at the midst of a sports celebration following a victory you know nothing about. That's the story of Vincent Degan, a young and immature ecology-savvy guy who crashes his car into a Morris column (a Parisian advertising pillar) and makes an instant jump from 1982: the day France lost against Germany -one of its most dramatic matches during the semi-finals- to July 1998 when they won the first World Cup, talk about a clever juxtaposition, not to mention the ensuing mood whiplash, imagining yourself shouting that your country have lost when everyone's celebrating a triumph.
The transition to 1998 marks the end of the first act that did a good job establishing Vincent as an insecure guy who, like his character in "Nine Months", doesn't want to settle on and have children with Laurie (Maria de Medeiros), a plucky 'Flower Power' girl he met in India. We see him hanging out with his friends at Laurette's (Ginette Garcia), there's Lionel (Gad El Maleh) and Daniel Russo is Ronny, who imagined a system of inflatables contraptions in case of car crashes, he called them "air bags" but in French, which doesn't have the same ring than "airbags". Vincent's not convinced anyway. Speaking of 'airbags', Braoudé provides us a little scene where the three men enjoy the vertiginous neckline of Sonia, the sexy shoe-seller (Isabelle Candellier) who's totally oblivious to their gazes and her own innuendos (push a little, what a nice pair etc.) The humor isn't the most subtle but it works.
The 1982 night marks a pivotal point in Vincent's life, he must make two crucial life-decisions: one involving Laurie and the second his father's business, to take the reins or let him sell it. Whenever Vincent's got a choice to make, he starts coughing, we get the point: this is an adept of the ostrich 'we'll see' policy and so Karma plays its dirtiest trick by transposing him to the future without the burden of a choice. This is a silly idea but based on a very deep reality: shy people often wish to be able to jump to a consequence without having to face a cause. I didn't even need a "why?", like for "Groundhog Day", when the set-up says enough about the protagonists, you can make up the meaning for yourself. And the point is less "how France has changed in 16 years", but "how Vincent has changed". He didn't overdo the technology-related gags but that's not saying much.
The problem with "Second Life" is in the treatment and the characterization, Braoudé plays his Vincent like a timid and calm little man, once he gets in 1998 and realizes he's married to Sonia, his hysteria lasts way too long to be acceptable. Bill Murray played it more smoothly, he was puzzled, defiant, scared, before he could crack up at day 2 or 3, Braoudé makes his Vincent so jumpy and overly excited that he squeezes all the likability out of him, and that infects the rest of the film. I can't count how many times I wanted someone to just yell a big "Shut Up". Vincent has a man-to-man talk with Ronny and it starts well but if you're not too attentive you might miss the bit about his 'airbag' concept being stolen and Vincent being the cause of his father's death... and Russo's talent is wasted in a scene where he settles his record by shouting again. The scene is redeemed by the little gag when Laurette asks Vincent whether he's hungry, he says he's just leaving room for her delicious cookies... then she says her husband died by choking on them, back to tears. Quiet but effective, the reaction of Braoudé proves how funny he is when relying on pathos, quiet pathos.
Another opportunity is wasted when he asks his boot-kisser assistant Steve Michaux to make a study about time loops, ambition knows no bounds so why not? Just when you think we're getting into a passionate discussion about time portals, we get back to one yelling at another, same with the quiet discussion with Laurie. It's a shame that a film that should have been more about the meaning of existence couldn't let his characters breath a little and talk like 'normal' persons, that's Braoudé's mistake, he forgets that the more normally people act, the funnier the comedy. Even the cops who arrest him act like total morons. There was a lot of depth in the way he questioned his ecological ideals, the superficiality of his financial success, his moral corruption... when you have such profound material, why bother with a stupid subplot involving Michaux or some weird twist about the father's "death"?
This is a film that asked truth-to-life questions but without any truth in itself ... and I was so angry at the film that the so-called happy ending left me actually thinking "wait, didn't he just technically prevent his 1998 children's existence?"
