Une heure de tranquillité [Do Not Disturb] (2014)

(On TV, October 2021) There’s an admirably compact aspect to the central idea of Une heure de tranquillité, as a middle-aged music lover finds a beloved album in a record store and heads home to listen to it in peace. Alas, this won’t be—an incompetent contractor has started work tearing down the walls of his upscale Parisian apartment, his wife has a marriage-shattering secret to tell him, his rebellious son brings in immigrant refugees, and one of his psychiatric patients is hounding him, threatening to expose their affair. Adapted from a theatrical play by playwright Florian Zeller himself, Une heure de tranquillité spends much of its first half setting up its conflicts, and the second half detonating them. The result can be very funny: the protagonist being so self-absorbed and intent on listening to his album, the revelation that his son has been fathered by someone else barely registers—or rather acts as a comfort considering how much he dislikes his son’s simpleminded activism. Other moments don’t work as well (anything to do with his mistress seems wasted, for instance) but the tone remains amiable throughout. The film’s concluding irony is that the character gets to listen to his album only when he lets go of the idea of doing it alone. It wraps up nicely: Une heure de tranquillité may have too many small annoyances and unlikable characters to fully register as a great comedy, but it’s pleasant and amusing enough to be worth a look.