‘Milo’ San Sebastian Review: Marion Cotillard Navigates Family Secrets and Criminal Entanglements

A family drama with elements of crime thriller and even a political edge, Milo tells the story of a woman who arrives in a town in the French countryside with the stated goal of rebuilding her life, of starting over from zero. At least that’s what she tells the owner of the roadside restaurant where she goes looking for work, but it’s fairly clear that isn’t the whole truth. Her taciturn, somewhat mysterious way of carrying herself makes it obvious she’s hiding something.

Alice (Marion Cotillard) rents a basic furnished apartment and starts working there, in Romans-sur-Isère, in southeastern France. Soon her rented motorbike breaks down suspiciously, giving her the opportunity to get it fixed at a garage where Milo works (the much sought-after Théodore Pellerin, seen in films like Nino and Lurker), a twentysomething she watches with particular attention and follows in his movements, seeing him mix with the area’s high society. Nicole García’s film splits from there to track the increasingly intricate situations and turns the two get caught up in, together and apart — two characters connected to each other in a way that, while fairly obvious, will keep revealing itself as the film goes on.

García initially threads things together with a sure hand, weaving what is ultimately a family drama that acquires, in the present timeline and through some shady activities Milo gets mixed up in, a film noir dimension. Meanwhile, in the past, details of Alice’s life come to light that flirt with a political thriller that never quite develops. Neither register wins out, so the time the film spends circling between them ends up excessive, with subplots that open up, seem important, and turn out to be more complicated than they are ultimately relevant.

At those moments Milo feels like the overstuffed adaptation of a novel with more angles to follow than a film has time for — except it isn’t, since this is an original screenplay. García is betting that these detours, especially the criminal one, will hold our interest, and they don’t; they feel like dead time that mostly serves to bring in more and more characters who confuse more than they add. At its core, what the director has to tell is the drama connecting Alice to Milo and to the people closest to them in the present, as well as those who surrounded her in that hazy past that gradually comes into focus.

García, now 80, films with elegance — a veteran who knows how to steer this kind of drama with a firm hand over cast and locations. And beyond its unnecessary subplots, Milo delivers what you’d expect from a contemporary French drama: crossed emotions, family tensions, psychological ambiguity, and a moderately compelling set of characters given the density of the story being told. The film from the director of Place Vendôme underuses some of the story’s potential, but still gets it to its destination with a certain wisdom and the dignity that experience lends to both sides of the camera.