A Better Life

Yann (Guillaume Canet) trained as a chef and walks with a chef’s swagger. It’s as easy for him to boast about his future plans as it is to pick up a woman in a bar, in this case the beautiful Nadia (Leila Bekhti). What he can’t seem to do is find the right job in Paris’s cutthroat restaurant world.

Yann, a cook, and Nadia, a waitress and mother of nine-year-old child, decide to risk everything on the purchase of a restaurant. With plenty of talent, energy, love and dreams, but no finances of their own, they find themselves forced into a jungle of financing and bank loans that quickly overwhelms them. To bail them out, Nadia has to take a job in Canada, while Yann is forced to stay behind to save the restaurant. Together, he and the child confront a relentless avalanche of creditors, an uncaring system and the daily grind from which there is no respite. Yann finally understands that his only chance of salvation lies in joining his lover – as well as reuniting mother and child – by following Nadia to Canada and a better life.
---------------------------------
Yann (Guillaume Canet) trained as a chef and walks with a chef’s swagger. It’s as easy for him to boast about his future plans as it is to pick up a woman in a bar, in this case the beautiful Nadia (Leila Bekhti). What he can’t seem to do is find the right job in Paris’s cutthroat restaurant world.

Programmer's Note

Ambition — that thirst that can never be slaked — is used to potent effect in Cédric Kahn’s timely drama A Better Life. Yann (Guillaume Canet) trained as a chef and walks with the attendant swagger. It’s as easy for him to boast about his future plans as it is for him to pick up a woman in a bar — in this case, the beautiful Nadia (Leïla Bekhti). What he can’t seem to do is find the right job in Paris’ cutthroat restaurant world.

As Yann falls into a passionate romance with Nadia, his dreams get bigger. He finds a grand old place in the woods that he wants to renovate and open for fine dining. He’s even ready to start a family with Nadia and her young son Slimane. What these two lovers lack is business sense. To finance ren­ovations, Yann takes out a series of revolving loans that drag him into a spiral of debt. He and Nadia begin to squabble. Restless and impatient to find work of her own, she leaves France for a job in Montreal, promis­ing to send for her son soon. Of course, soon stretches out indefinitely.

There’s a wonderful scene in A Better Life in which Yann discovers that Slimane has shoplifted a pair of running shoes. He confronts the boy and tries to teach him a lesson, but even this attempt at discipline leaves both man and child in more dire circumstances. As he tries to be a father to Slimane and a success in his own eyes, Yann finds that debt and high principles can feed each other to desperate effect.

Canet has proven himself to be both a superb director (Tell No One, Little White Lies) and actor (Last Night). Under Kahn’s direction, he delivers a strong, complex performance, showing both Yann’s appeal­ing drive and his crippling stubbornness. Although Kahn takes this recession-era story into the pitiless terrain of the Dardennes and Dostoyevsky, by the time Yann gets to Canada, there’s very good reason for hope.
Cameron Bailey
Director's Bio

Cédric Kahn was born in Paris. He has directed the feature films Bar des rails (92), Trop de Bonheur (94), L’ennui (98), Robert Succo (01), Red Lights (04), L’Avion (05), Les regrets (09) and A Better Life (11).