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Dir. Claude Chabrol
Rating: 4.3 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
The May/December romance fantasy is alive and well in modern Paris, a time-honored tradition of grotesque, aging French men harboring not-so-secret desires for the freshest young lilies of the valley. In Claude Chabrol's latest film, he positions a young, beautiful weather girl, Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier), between two, equally disconcerting poles: an elderly, fabulously successful and brutishly amoral writer, Charles (François Berléand), and a blonde fop named Paul (Benoît Magimel), who wears tight, wide-pinstriped suits without a tie and a small-mouthed smirk on his face that makes you want to hit him in the head with a tire-iron. Repeatedly. Poor Gabrielle settles on Charles, who proves the worth of her choice by taking off at his first opportunity, leading her to marry Paul, a mistake that everyone warns her against making. Given that both men are so fiendishly unlikable, and indefatigably selfish, there's not much of a choice for her to make: Paul bites his nails furtively and pushes his blonded locks into his eyes like he's hitting the town with the Chemical Brothers; Charles, smug and condescending, self-indulgently pulls her head to his crotch so she can blow him as he works on his new novel. The film offers little to clarify itself, we're never sure if Gabrielle's misguided love for Charles is meant to be taken seriously or is simply the whim of a young and impressionable woman. The fact that all the beautiful women in Charles' life, including his "saint" of a wife (also quite young, naturally) seem to love him with fully unearned devotion stacks the deck in favor of the old man -- is this a good time to mention Chabrol is nearly 80? -- but nothing is really ever made clear. Is Chabrol suggesting that this is the choice French women get to make? If so, join me in weeping for our fair mademoiselles across the Atlantic.
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