The Clink of Ice

A slight return for feisty, 71-year-old provocateur Bertrand Blier, the French writer-director who made his name tickling the raw nerve endings of middle-class social and sexual mores with films like ‘Les Valseuses’ and ‘Merci La Vie’. Optimistically billed as a comedy about mortality, it chronicles the final days of shitbag writer and flâneur Charles Faulque (Jean Dujardin, pictured left) as he’s pursued around his country pile by his cancer, which has taken the form of a besuited Albert Dupontel (also pictured). It’s a ballsy idea that could have yielded laughs and insight (see Ken Loach’s ‘Looking for Eric’), but Blier settles for full-blown theatrics and vulgar knife-twisting instead of offering any credible assumptions on how we confront terminal illness. There’s no story as such: Blier just tosses another character and malady into the mix when the pace slows. It’s amusing, but too glib to retain any emotional hold.