Cellmates: "The Clink of Ice"

The Ciné Lumière this week launches a retrospective devoted to Bertrand Blier, one of France's craftiest provocateurs, with the UK premiere of his most recent work. Set against the creative deliquescence last week's Hereafter suggested Clint Eastwood has given into, The Clink of Ice appears even more like the work of a sly old dog raging against the dying of the light, and more concerned with tying up loose ends here on earth than fantasising about things to come. At the film's centre is an unimpeachably terrific idea: having cancer played by an actor, much as Plague and Pestilence were in medieval passion plays.

A prize-winning author (Jean Dujardin) is busy drinking himself into oblivion at his country retreat when a well-dressed, wild-haired figure (Albert Dupontel, Cassel's mate in Irreversible) turns up at the front gate, announcing he'll be the writer's personal scourge for the foreseeable future. And so it goes. When the writer eats, Cancer eats; when he drinks (as is his wont), Cancer drinks too. It's Cancer who tells the writer when to go to bed - and Cancer who's there in bed beside him when his Russian mistress (Christa Theret) comes to call. Every time the writer thinks he's got rid of his unwanted visitor - tossing him over the walls of his fortress, or blasting him in the gut with a shotgun - Cancer comes back for more: "Send in the metastases!"

The Clink of Ice is, most immediately, a well-staged joke, and I mean to infer a degree of theatricality with that: it's ninety minutes spent watching a small handful of characters - the writer and his cancer, plus the former's lovelorn housekeeper (Anne Alvaro, the actress in The Taste of Others) and the dark shadow following her around in her wake - shuffling about a limited number of locations. Its big effects are few and far between, throwing the spotlight back on the acting and writing: not for the first time Blier is liable to accusations his female characters are divided into madonnas and whores, although Alvaro and Theret do their very best to make something memorable from these archetypes.

At any rate, parts of the film appear very much intended to be taken in, if not outright bad, then certainly questionable taste - if only because they move us past the cinema's usual bland, teary-eyed, television-ready approach to cancer (cf. the final twenty minutes of this week's A Little Bit of Heaven). Falling squarely into this category are the scenes with a doctor who'd rather headbutt his patients than anaesthetise them, and that in which Alvaro's maid seduces Dujardin's teenage son - a sequence you could accuse of being (retrograde) pornographic fantasy, were it not for Blier's sudden and unexpected restraint in filming it. Indeed, considering his reputation as an outgrown enfant terrible, the director here proves surprisingly respectful of certain storytelling conventions: most of the characters, right up to the intruders in the final moments, serve a symbolic function of some sort.

Dujardin's rocky outcrop could almost be one of those villas found in classical Greek drama, its resident cancers forming a malevolent Chorus, announcing their strategies directly to the audience. (Again, there's a theatricality at play that viewers will either go with or resist.) Its timelessness extends to the casting of contrasts - pitting the devilish Dupontel against the classically handsome Dujardin and family - but individual scenes are also choreographed in that jolting modernist fashion Hal Hartley's comedies used to be. What impressed me most about The Clink of Ice was that it's never just contented to be a joke or wind-up, but instead reaches towards something more daring besides: an attempt to rethink our generally passive and agonised way of both filming and coping with terminal illness. Blier reframes cancer not as something done to us, but a conspiracy of sorts, an ongoing, even epic struggle between good and evil that has been going on for centuries, and - unless someone comes up with that cure - likely to go on for centuries more to come.

The Clink of Ice screens at the Ciné Lumière at the Institut Français in South Kensington tonight (followed by a Blier Q&A), and until February 17th.