In Bed With Victoria

Directed by Justine Triet

Running time: 1hr36 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Vincent Lacoste and Virginie Efira in In Bed With Victoria

Nearly eight years ago, when her second feature In Bed With Victoria premiered in the Critics’ Week sidebar at the Cannes festival, you wouldn’t necessarily have guessed that writer-director Justine Triet would be holding aloft a shiny Palme d’Or less than a decade later. A winningly manic and off-kilter comedy, it’s bright and light on its feet in ways that don’t tend to land prestigious hardware — which isn’t to say you can’t detect its shared DNA with Triet’s recent, triumphant Anatomy of a Fall. Triet specialises in stories of vital, highly capable women thrust into extreme situations that even they can’t control: rewrite the rigorous courtroom drama of Anatomy as a careering screwball romp, its mood swinging with the impulses of its reckless protagonist, and you’d end up with something not a million miles from this — right down to a certain canine-centred narrative crux.

That tonal volatility makes In Bed With Victoria a perfect fit for Film of the Week favourite Virginie Efira, whose rise to French screen queendom accelerated more or less from this point. As Victoria, an ace criminal lawyer and single mother struggling to keep her personal and professional lives in line — and, by extension, separate — she keeps her dual aptitudes for buoyant farce and everywoman frazzlement closely twinned; Triet’s script keeps challenging the character, piling on complications and absurdities with loose abandon, but never humiliates her in the way Hollywood tends to trip up its klutzy romcom heroines. Victoria, introduced in a phase of romantic and sexual ennui, is tasked with defending a friend accused of stabbing his partner, in an increasingly loopy case with a dalmatian as a star witness; at the same time, a dreamy former client and reformed drug dealer offers his services as an intern, only to become a live-in nanny.

What sounds like sitcom-level zaniness on paper proves stranger and more humane in practice. Triet and her star share an interest in the fault lines, dark particularities and well-managed weaknesses of women that other scripts might more blandly fashion as “strong female characters”. In this quick, witty and rampantly enjoyable film, Victoria spirals compellingly out of control, but never beyond credibility.

IN BED WITH VICTORIA (2016) Written by Justine Triet and Thomas Lévy-Lasne | Shot by Simon Beaufils | Edited by Laurent Sénéchal