Entre amis (2015)

Richard (Daniel Auteuil), Gilles (Gérard Jugnot) and Philippe (François Berléand) have been friends for fifty years. Richard is rich and, as we learn at the end of the film, his wife left him six months earlier. He has since been happy with Daphné (Mélanie Doutey), who is twenty-five years younger than he is and, as we later learn, is an ophthalmologist. For their vacation, he rents a superb, thirty-eight-metre-long wooden sailboat in Marseille’s Old Port and invites his two friends and their partners: Astrid (Zabou Breitman), who is with Philippe and earns a comfortable living in communications, and Carole (Isabelle Gélinas), Gilles’s wife, with whom he has two children. Also coming aboard are the skipper, Batistou (Jean-Philippe Ricci), a Corsican with a strong accent and a fondness for the guitar, and his sister, who serves as stewardess. Soon after they set off, everyone’s personalities emerge, along with the unspoken grievances, jealousies, frustrations and other real or imagined wounds between them, both in their relationships and among the three friends. The situation turns critical when, in the middle of a Force 10 storm, the skipper is struck on the head by the boom and, unconscious, is no longer able to steer the boat. This intensifies the tensions. Richard, a former student at the Glénans sailing school, manages to anchor the vessel in the lee of a rocky islet, but then a full-blown brawl breaks out in the saloon where everyone has taken shelter. During the fight, Richard grabs an axe and wrecks the interior fittings. Nevertheless, after this climax, the members of the cruise realize their responsibility toward the skipper, who urgently needs medical attention, and bravely get under way again. Once they return to an area with mobile phone coverage, they can alert the sea rescue services, and Batistou is winched aboard a helicopter and evacuated with his sister. The ordeal has allowed everyone to put their grievances into words and revealed unsuspected mental strengths in some of the group. As they resolve their main interpersonal difficulties, they all become aware of what unites them, and the ordeal helps restore the bonds both among the three friends and with their partners. So everything seems to be going well again in the calm that has returned, aboard a vessel nevertheless completely devastated by the storm and dismasted, when removing the axe Richard had accidentally embedded in the hull causes a leak that sinks the boat. The six protagonists end up on an inflatable raft, whose tube Philippe punctures while clumsily handling the shaft of a harpoon gun.