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I walked out of this film after fifty minutes and would have been better off had I left after ten minutes.
This film provides an example that the French are as capable of making films as bad as mainstream American trash. Here we focus on married couples, one of which--an Indian couple--hardly receives any attention because they represent a still-loving pair after fifteen or so years of marriage.
Instead, the remaining husbands, Vincent and Georges, plus their single friend Fred, are the focus of attention. All of them are sexist louts only concerned with talking about bedding women and discussing women's T&A. Fred is a stereotype: the ugly guy you would think no woman would look at twice but who is, in fact, juggling a string of women. But then none of the male or female characters is developed in any depth here.
It's hard to believe a film would waste time on such guys. Their wives would be better off divorced from these sexist pigs and their children probably would be better off without them, too. The lifestyle these people are shown living is remarkably like that of too many Americans seen in mainstream films--arguing with each other, spending too much time in front of a TV set, overeating, and overweight. Of course, in French films, there's plenty of smoking, but it often looks chic. Not here, where Gabrielle is shown cooking in one scene with a cigarette dangling out of her lips. Ugh! Even the apartments these people live in are ugly. Gabrielle's kitchen could use the services of a good cleaning company.
The narrative line of the film is fractured. In the opening scene, Vincent comes into a bar and picks up his own wife, whom two other men are also trying to pick up. At this point, we don't understand that Vincent and Gabrielle are married. This makes for a very confusing opening to say the least.
Elsewhere in the film, similar chronology tricks are employed. I hadn't the least interest in the characters and was be-damned if I was going to try to figure out the fractured chronology. As in the atrocious "The Constant Gardener," the in-your-face technique (swish pans and rack focusing in particular here) seem an attempt to distract viewers from the humorless, lousy story.
At one point, Johnny Depp has a cameo moment with Gabrielle in a record store. Depp looks awful, as if he needed a shower, a shave, and a haircut as well as the services of the makeup people on the set. I understand that in a later scene, Depp reappears as a client to whom Gabrielle, a real estate agent, shows an apartment. And in that scene in an elevator going up to that apartment Gabrielle and the nameless character Depp plays at last have sex. Ho-hum. I obviously didn't miss a thing by walking out when I did.
During the fifty minutes I was in the audience at the 19th Street Theatre in Allentown, PA, I heard no laughter at all from an audience of about 70 people. During a food fight scene (Can you believe it?) between Gabrielle and Vincent, I heard a few titters of laughter, that sounded like an embarrassed response, as if the titters came from people who were asking themselves, "What are we doing watching something like this?" I couldn't understand why the entire audience didn't arise en masse and leave the theatre.
score /10
fordraff 17 September 2005
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1174228/ |
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27-2-2021 00:05:14