An enjoyable sophomore rom-com from Triet about ‘courtrooms and bedrooms’ as a lawyer’s personal life becomes murkily entwined with her professional exploits.
Review #2,759
Dir. Justine Triet
2016 | France | Comedy, Drama, Romance | 96 min | 2.35:1 | French & English
M18 (passed clean) for sexual scene
Cast: Virginie Efira, Vincent Lacoste, Melvil Poupaud
Plot: Victoria is a thirty-something divorced lawyer who’s struggling to raise her two daughters. She is canny and cynical but on the verge of an emotional breakdown. At a friend’s wedding, she reconnects with Vincent, an old friend, and Sam, an old client. Her life is about to take a new turn.
Awards: Official Selection (Cannes)
International Sales: Indie Sales
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Personal vs. Professional Lives; Conflict of Interest; Midlife Crisis
Narrative Style: Straightforward
Pace: Normal
Audience Type: Slightly Mainstream
Viewed: MUBI
Spoilers: No
A follow-up to Age of Panic (2013), Justine Triet’s In Bed with Victoria is a natural extension to her debut feature and an invigorating genre exercise. Both films feature a woman who has to juggle taking care of her kids singlehandedly with the stressors inherent in her profession.
Instead of the former’s depiction of a journalist reporting on the 2012 French presidential elections, we have the eponymous Victoria (Virginie Efira), a criminal lawyer struggling with her past.
When she is asked to represent a client who is a friend accused of attempted murder, while also serendipitously crossing paths with an ex-client whom she previously defended, things become complicated.
Triet, who has recently elevated her reputation to considerable heights with the critical success of Anatomy of a Fall (2023), takes the traditional rom-com and fashions it into a hybrid of light, witty liners and sobering scenarios of professional miscalculation.
“This is why I can’t be your lawyer.”
Feeling mentally isolated, Victoria seeks refuge in alcohol and sex, and this is where In Bed with Victoria may be best described as a film about ‘courtrooms and bedrooms’, where her personal life becomes murkily entwined with her professional exploits.
Enjoyable from moment to moment, it is easy to dismiss Triet’s work here as unabashedly fun insofar as we are encouraged to take gleeful satisfaction in the protagonist’s plight.
If you have seen Anatomy, I would recommend that you check out Triet’s three prior works, including the admittedly uneven Sibyl (2019), because you will find that they each contain ideas and themes—some already fully formed, others tantalisingly rudimentary—that her latest Cannes Palme d’Or winner would coalesce with clear artistic and intellectual ambition.
It remains to be seen if Triet will return to making movies like Victoria again.
Grade: B+
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 
Interesting review. Definitely sounds like a provocative film I won’t want to see with my parents lol. That being said, I really like Justine Triet. Her Oscar-nominated “Anatomy of a Fall” really stunned me with its depiction of a marriage falling apart. She appears to be a director with a bright future. Here is my review of “Anatomy of a Fall”:
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