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Directed by Agnès Jaoui  One doesn't like to be nation-ist, but French filmmakers really are good at combining social comedy with deep insights into the casual cruelties of ordinary life - the insensitivity and egotism within relationships, and people's blindness to each other. Lolita (Marilou Berry) is a half-beautiful, unconventionally large, girl with a potentially lovely voice, whose father Etienne, (Jean-Pierre Bacri) is completely regardless of her needs and her love for him. Now remarried to a slim, weight-obsessed woman scarcely older than Lolita, he is a successful novelist, and a hero figure for Pierre (Laurent Grévill) an aspiring and wimpy writer with a kind, competent and devoted wife Sylvie (Agnès Jaoui, the director, in a performance that is as subtle and affecting as her directing) who happens to be Lolita's music teacher.
Reading between the lines, we gather that she has given up a singing career to be both financial and spiritual support for him. When Lolita provides the introduction to Etienne, Pierre's life changes, and brought into the hot-house milieu of the writing establishment he becomes in his turn successful. Etienne's star now on the wane, his self-absorption grows, and he becomes increasingly monstrous in his treatment of his daughter. I don't know when I last felt so like slapping the face of a film character. About their literary output we care not a jot - if their art mirror their lives, it can't be up to much. The literary world is, in fact, given short shrift, while the world of music, the only one in which Lolita can find herself, is seen as a liberating force. And yet even that undeniably beautiful aspect of her goes unappreciated by her father. Success also come under scrutiny -Sylvie has sacrificed it for love, it has turned Etienne into the monstre sacré that he is, and threatens to do the same to Pierre. And success means nothing to Lolita when the one person in her audience she wants to impress, her father, has not even been listening.
 Marilou Berry as Lolita is remarkable, capable of being beautiful one minute and lumpish the next. Hers is the central, everyday anguish that says ‘look at me', the longing to be taken notice of and to be an important part of another's life, combined with the desire to hide oneself in shame - oh those depressing shopping trips to buy something special that finish up with yet another black sweater... But even Lolita is not immune from disregarding others - she is blind to the devotion of Sebastien, a shy and similarly marginalised young person, who conceals his North African background by gallicising his name. She has been so harmed by the experience of being unloved, that she cannot trust that his is genuine.
Director, script writer and actress Jaoui and Bacri the bad father are in life husband and wife, and one wonders how much of their own interplay might have been a workshop basis for the relationship interchanges on show here. The acting is light and assured and touching, and seeing that this IS a comedy at heart there are many wry laughs at this preoccupied, rather comical group of people, (particularly the statutory scenes round the dinner table - this is a French film, remember?), and a beautiful bicycle sequence in the dark (that's two great ones this year - see also I'm Not Afraid...) brings a satisfying but open-ended resolution. A small classic.
Tyneside Cinema, November 2004 www.bbc.co.uk/films/2004/10/28/look_at_me_2004_review.shtml |
