It would be hard to find a pair of filmmakers more closely associated than Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, the co-writers and co-directors of A Difficult Year. A year or two apart in age, they could be brothers, with matching grey beards and similar sensibilities. “We want to tell the same kind of story,” Nakache says. “He has never written anything on his own, and I’ve never written anything on my own.”
Together, they made the highest-grossing French-language film of all time, the heartwarming The Intouchables (2011), which earned over $US400 million ($587 million) around the world (far surpassing the 2017 Hollywood remake, The Upside). Fittingly, their latest film is another tale of male friendship.
Both born in France to Jewish parents originally from North Africa, Nakache and Toledano met as teenagers at summer camp more than 30 years ago and bonded immediately over their love of cinema. By the time they were in their early 20s, they were making short films together – and as Nakache tells it, they’ve rarely been apart since.
Today is an exception. For this interview, Nakache is speaking for both of them, though Toledano isn’t far off, apparently talking to another journalist in the same Paris hotel. Just before I came in, Nakache says, the two of them did a photoshoot together: “We were fooling around together exactly the way we were doing when we were 16.”
Francois Cluzet (left) and Omar Sy in The Intouchables.Credit: Roadshow
Under these circumstances, it seems like more than chance that stories of male friendship have become their stock in trade. The Intouchables followed the buddy movie formula of pairing characters from different walks of life, with Francois Cluzet as a wealthy, stuffy quadriplegic and Omar Sy as the energetic Senegalese immigrant who becomes his carer.
A Difficult Year is a buddy movie too, though the heroes, Albert (Pio Marmai) and Bruno (Jonathan Cohen), are kindred spirits rather than opposites who attract. As we might say in Australia, they’re a couple of dropkicks – single, middle-aged guys with no fixed abode, no prospects and no scruples when it comes to petty scams (Albert works as an airport baggage handler but makes his real living reselling confiscated items).
Both are mired in debt, and join a support group for over-spenders, run by Henri (Mathieu Amalric), a community worker who has yet to conquer his own gambling addiction. At the same time they join up with an environmental activist collective, mainly for the free drinks and snacks, although Albert also has his eye on its idealistic leader, Valentine (Noemie Merlant from Portrait of a Lady on Fire).
Like Nakache and Toledano’s other movies, A Difficult Year is designed for the most part as a string of gags. But there are grimmer elements to the story: when we meet Bruno he is on the brink of suicide, and he continues to struggle with depression throughout. There’s also an element of social commentary which Nakache sees as harking back to the tradition of Italian filmmakers such as Dino Risi, whose classics include 1961’s A Difficult Life.
“It’s risky, but it’s our combination,” Nakache says of this mix of seriousness and humour. “We could write dramatic movies, but … comedy has a sort of elegance. It’s a way to take the weight out of a very heavy situation without omitting the essence of it.”
Directors Eric Toledano (left) and Olivier Nakache.Credit: Palace Films
He and Toledano started out five or six years ago intending to write a film about financial precarity, but were overtaken by events.
“When the pandemic hit, it really took all our ideas away,” he says. “We write very contemporary movies. We try to be relevant to what’s going on right now … so we were really wondering how to be relevant in these conditions.” In the end, they spent much of the lockdown working on their TV show In Therapy, set in a psychologist’s office; the second season, which premiered in 2022, deals directly with the COVID era.
Once they were able to go out in the world again, they revived their original concept for A Difficult Year, attending budget workshops similar to those depicted in the film. As luck would have it, the venue also hosted meetings of Extinction Rebellion, the environmental activist organisation founded on the principle of non-violent civil disobedience.
A Difficult Year charts the unlikely alliance between a pair of broke dropkicks and members of Extinction Rebellion. Credit: Carole Bethuel
“There was a switch of meeting rooms and we ended up in their meeting,” Nakache recalls, which sounds almost too neat to be true. At any rate, it was around this time he and Toledano hit on the idea of paralleling the two groups: “People who want to save themselves from debt, and workers who want to save the world from itself.”
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A Difficult Year could be seen as a film about what it means to be a consumer, announced at the outset through images of a stampeding crowd at a Black Friday sale. At one end of the spectrum, Albert and Bruno have ruined their lives through their lack of impulse control. At the other, Valentine sticks to her austere principles to the point where she’s shut down emotionally, leaving her little room for pleasure of any sort.
In this context, Nakache suggests, the image of an empty apartment can carry different meanings. “It can tell the story of struggles with low-end debt. And it can also be the embodiment of a philosophy.”
A Difficult Year is still meant primarily as a comedy. “Of course we don’t want to fall into mean laughter, or we don’t want to mock people, that’s not the aim. But we have this desire for comedy, we want to hear screening rooms with people laughing … I’m like a drug addict, and I hope never to come out of this addiction.”
Working with Toledano, he says, is a way of hanging on to this kind of enjoyment, “trying to find those teenage moments in all that lost time”. At the same time, their collaboration is a means of staying grounded, since there’s always someone to share the credit or the blame. “Whether a movie is good or bad, it’s not my fault, it’s our fault.”
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This was especially crucial when they hit the jackpot with The Intouchables. “We were extremely lucky – what happened is the kind of thing that happens only once in a lifetime. But we were also lucky to be together to take everything in. And to keep being able to keep telling stories together.”
A beat, then the punchline. “But in the end, I do everything.” That’s probably easier to say when your other half isn’t around – although Toledano, in the next room, might well be saying the same thing to someone else.
A Difficult Year is in cinemas now.