The Last Day [Le Dernier Jour] *** (2004, Gaspard Ulliel, Mélanie Laurent, Nicole Garcia, Thibault Vinçon, Bruno Todeschini) – Classic Movie Review 12,664

The bleak and gloomy, though fascinating 2004 French romantic drama film The Last Day [Le Dernier Jour] is an impressive showcase for its young star Gaspard Ulliel, and he shows he’s got what it takes.

Writer/ director Rodolphe Marconi’s bleak and gloomy, though fascinating 2004 French romantic drama film The Last Day [Le Dernier Jour] stars Gaspard Ulliel, Mélanie Laurent, and Nicole Garcia. The film is more of a challenge than a heart-warmer, but it is an impressive showcase for its young actor Ulliel, and he shows he’s got what it takes.

Gaspard Ulliel stars as the 18-year-old artist Simon, who arrives at his parents’ seaside holiday home at vacation time to visit his dysfunctional family with Louise (Mélanie Laurent), a lovely, fearless teenage girl he has met on the train there. He casually takes her home with him and introduces her as his school friend.

But Simon’s return home is troubled by his unrequited love for his childhood male friend, Mathieu (Thibault Vinçon), who lives in a (perhaps symbolic) lighthouse. Simon starts a tentative relationship with Louise. They share a bed but don’t have sex as he would like, for she is provocative and alluring. Then Simon is further, and greatly, troubled when Louise develop a liaison of her own with his childhood friend Mathieu. It seems a bit like a Jules et Jim threesome situation, where someone is going to miss out, and that looks like it’s going to be Simon.

Meanwhile Simon struggles to cope with the growing distance from his unpleasant father, but, second to Simon, the mother is the significant character of the film. Simon is very close to his mother, Marie (Nicole Garcia), who is having troubles of her own, what with her dysfunctional relationship with her husband, and the arrival of her old lover. A phone call summons from the one-time lover leads to the revelation of a 20 year-old family secret.

A couple of decades on, it is heart-breaking to see the young Ulliel now. Among those who paid tribute to Ulliel following his death after a skiing accident at La Rosière resort in Savoie, France, Ulliel on 19 January 2022 at the age of 37, were French President Emmanuel Macron, who described him as ‘an icon of French elegance who dazzled the cameras’.

Ulliel’s look and films such as 2003’s Strayed, The Last Day [Le dernier jour] (2004), 2006’s Paris, je t’aime, and Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World (2016), and his performance as Yves Saint Laurent in the 2014 film Saint Laurent, turned him into a gay icon. He was in a relationship with French model and singer Gaëlle Pietri from 2013 to 2020, and had a son, born in January 2016.

In 2006, he appeared opposite Marianne Faithfull and Elias McConnell in Gus Van Sant’s Le Marais segment of the anthology film Paris, je t’aime, playing Gaspard, a young gay man flirting with a male print shop worker (McConnell). In 2016, he starred in Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World as Louis, a playwright who returns home after 12 years to tell his family that he’s dying, In 2012, Ulliel made his stage debut in Que faire de Mister Sloane?, an adaptation of Joe Orton’s 1963 play Entertaining Mr Sloane.

He played the young Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal Rising (2007).

The cast are Gaspard Ulliel as Simon, Nicole Garcia as Marie, Mélanie Laurent as Louise, Bruno Todeschini as Marc, Alysson Paradis as Alice, Christophe Malavoy as Jean-Louis, and Thibault Vinçon as Mathieu.

© Derek Winnert 2023 – Classic Movie Review 12,664

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