Monsieur je-sais-tout (2018)

Vincent Barteau, a divorced man in his forties, is a former professional footballer who now coaches a club that recruits young football talent. Estranged from his family, he had walked out on his parents for good at the age of 16, when his father refused to let him pursue a career as a footballer. His sister Pauline, a complicated woman who travels the world, has left her son Léonard with his grandparents, who own a château on an island off the Atlantic coast. While Vincent’s mother, Françoise Barteau, is in hospital for a bypass operation, her two Spanish employees, Antonio and Lidia, offload Léonard, nicknamed Léo, onto Vincent against his will, just as he is preparing to leave for China to coach a football team there. Léo is highly nervous and introverted, and autistic. He rattles off repetitive phrases in a monotone and calculates everything, applying statistical laws to all his choices. He is also remarkably gifted at chess. Vincent is therefore forced to drag Léo, whom he has never met before, along to the football pitch, and has no idea what to do with this bothersome nephew. But despite his condition, Léo takes an interest in football and eventually joins the young talent squad. It turns out that Léo has a remarkable ability to calculate football tactics and the trajectory of the ball, because he applies his understanding of the many possible moves on a chessboard. By comparison, he finds football’s tactical options “simplistic”; he studies them systematically on videos that he plays over and over. He could therefore make a good goalkeeper, where his extraordinary powers of anticipation would shine. He says he wants to try to pursue a career in the profession. With support from the club doctor, the young Dr. Saubade, he makes great progress in socializing, despite Vincent’s harshness and arrogance. But, despite himself, Vincent gradually becomes more indulgent and empathetic toward Léo, who comes to share his enthusiasm for the sport. However, Léo learns that Vincent has to leave for China. The boy will therefore have to return to a facility suited to his needs. From then on, he withdraws into his “bubble” (in fact, he stops speaking altogether) and eventually ends up in a psychiatric facility, where the head of the department diagnoses him with schizophrenia. Vincent, who has finally realized, with the help of the lovely Dr. Mathilde, just how attached he has become to Léonard, will have to fight the hospital doctors and win young Léo’s trust back in order to bring him out of his silence—and out of his psychiatric dead end.