A Difficult Year at the Movies: Why Is This Movie With Jonathan Cohen and Pio Marmai Titled?

Four years after Hors Normes, here’s to a tough year. This is the eighth feature film directed by Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache as a duo in just over twenty years. Pio Marmai, Noemi Merlant and Jonathan Cohen star in this comedy about overconsumption or the climate emergency.

And it doesn’t take long to understand the meaning of this new film, because it is repeated several times in the first scene: a montage of presidential speeches from December 31, in which the phrase “difficult year” returns systematically.

A tongue-in-cheek introduction that plays comedy of repetition. And what is the result of a good coincidence: “We got invited to a TV show where they do this little montage”Olivier Nakache opens up for AlloCiné Club alongside a preview. “It gave us the idea to go further, to dig, to look.”

“And when we saw that the word came back like a kind of mantra, we said to ourselves that this was a title we liked and turned to Italian comedies. This is a title full of paradoxes. The film is full of contradictions: it’s a comedy, but it’s called “A Difficult Year” so as not to miss the difficult topics that are discussed there. So he established himself very, very quickly.”

We will meet in a little more than two months, on December 31, to see if we can add a new passage to the montage that opens a difficult year.

Commentary collected by Maximilien Pierret in Paris on September 18, 2023