Cannes Review: Laurent Larivière's 'I Am A Soldier' Starring Louise Bourgoin And Jean-Hughes Anglade

Around about this time last year in the Un Certain Regard sidebar of Cannes we were discovering eventual winner Kornél Mundruczó's "White God" which features incarcerated, maltreated dogs taking revenge on their human captors. So a little deja vu was inevitable when at a key moment in Laurent Larivière's debut feature "I Am A Soldier" a character gets mauled to unconsciousness by a riled-up German Shepherd escaped from its joyless cage. But while canine captivity is definitely a part of Larivière's debut film, his focus is resolutely on the human characters, the sordid decisions they make in order to keep their heads above water in a drowning economy, and the relationships that crumble and coalesce in that crucible. It is narrow in scope, solid in execution but a little too familiar and too unfocused to take to heart.

It does however boast a strong, un-self-pitying performance from model/TV presenter-turned-actress Louise Bourgoin...