On his way through Paris, Jérôme Varenne, who has lived in Shanghai for ten years, visits his mother to introduce her to his fiancée, Cheng Li. He finds out the family manor in Ambray still has not been sold in the wake of his father’s death, due to a suit between city hall and the potential buyer, a childhood friend. So Jérôme goes to Ambray to sort things out, unaware that old memories lie in wait and that he is about to sir up a family crisis…

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The good news is that Jean-Paul Rappeneau, director of Cyrano de Bergerac and The Horseman on the Roof and not seen in film since 2003’s Bon voyage, is making one of his rare appearances. The bad news is that he hasn’t managed to recreate the epic, romantic energy of his previous work. The 83-year-old director doesn’t seem to know what to do with this story of a troublesome family. With a plot about old rivalries that is too boring to be interesting and too polite to be entertaining, scenes follow one another dispassionately, despite a few good dialogues. Mathieu Amalric heads up a star-studded cast (Karin Viard, Gilles Lellouche, Nicole Garcia, André Dussollier) all working within their comfort zone. One exception is Marine Vacth, the discovery of François Ozon’s Young and Beautiful, who lights up Families with her lightness, her energy and her sensual haughtiness. Despite being the least known of the cast, Vacth is the real star of this otherwise simplistic movie.