Truly Dreadful Film

Pretty Good

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Blistering performances.

I wish I lived in France so that I am able to watch all of Elsa Zylberstein's films. Good or bad, I don't care. She is my Catherine Deneuve. Young Catherine and today's Catherine still mesmerizes. Five-years ago, I became a fan of Elsa's after watching I LOVED YOU FOR SO LONG. I Found MODIGLIANI on YouTube--and became obsessed with the artist and his muse, Jeanne. I learned something new. Now UN PLUS UNE has directed me toward India and its unique culture. I NEVER listen to critics when I WANT to see a movie. If I am able to sit through it once. Good. But two or three times is to me a life-changing movie. Loved the dialogue between the two leads. I didn't want this story to end. Reminded me of BRIEF ENCOUNTER. But when Amma, the hugging saint appeared, that part stirred a raw emotion in me--brought me to tears. I became intrigued. Who is this woman now on my Bucket List? I looked her up on the web. Again, I learned something new.The airport scene in Un PLUS UNE seemed a bit off, but it did reveal the Ambassador's, false heart. I don't think he loved his wife. (He did Anna a favour). What made me truly respect Claude Lelouch as an Oscar-winning director was the ending. But you have to stick around until the credits finish rolling.

The director is most famous for directing the movie "A Man and a Woman". Fifty years later, he makes the film with the same theme again. The story is set in India. A woman who plays the lead who always adheres to the Oriental philosophy. But the man is a composer and an idealistic type. In this story, they go on a pilgrimage after that. This plot was not too shabby. But I can't accept these easily. Then they met a mysterious woman who says she can cure any kind of illness and said "love is my religion". I'm vaguely Buddhist so I somehow understand to the philosophy about "the wheel of life" even though nobody taught that to me. I don't think all of the people live to suffer for the future life. And I don't know why they're always celebrities, and they have a luxury travel after a pilgrimage, after all they meet with success. I felt empty that our dreams don't surely come true if you went to a pilgrimage. I felt the same thing when I saw the American movie "Eat Pray Love". Anyway the song will finish in a 3 minutes, the movie will end in 2 hours, our life will continue.

I have to confess that I have not watched the first film of the director about a man and a woman in order to use it as a criterion of comparison. I simply evaluate this movie independently. There is a certain aspect which I found amazingly pertinent, current and within the realities of modern western life. When the two protagonists speak to each other during certain scenes of the movie the wife of the ambassador played by Elsa Zylberstein describes certain feelings and thoughts she has about self-realization, communication with the universe and other ideas pertaining to New Age spirituality. The protagonist answers with irony. Later the spiritual longings of the lady are satisfied through a pilgrimage to the river Ganges and a visit to a modern day Indian Hinduist saint. In short she has the fascination of the affluent westerners with supposed oriental wisdom. I loved this aspect of the movie as it was portrayed by witty dialogues and the real as well as the esoteric and spiritual journey of the protagonists through India. If you observe the success of figures as the Dalai Lama with western audiences or read magazines such as the French "Le Monde des Religions" you will have a picture of this unmistakable trend in affluent Western countries as France and Britain. It forms the backbone of the film which is also a love story.The colorful depiction of India and the lively and lovely actors as well as the music add to the total impressive ambiance of this movie. But for me the fascination with the East as a place of spiritual self-discovery and the dialogues where Anna Hamon the ambassador's wife played by Elsa Zylberstein expresses herself freely in a flow of New Age speak, stand as monuments of perceptiveness about how a considerable number of women and men in the West think, fantasize and feel about the alleged spiritual qualities of an imaginary East.

You could, if you had a mind to, have a lot of fun with this, bringing in the school of thought that some directors tend to make the same movie over and over, recalling that Lelouch gave the world the ultimate chocolate box in Un Homme et une femme and now, half a century on, he weighs in with un + une; in English of course we don't differentiate between definite and indefinite articles so that 'the', 'a' and 'an' are a one size covers all whilst in France un is the indefinite article for a male person or thing and une the feminine. This gives us a new film from Lelouch which translates directly as male + female or more loosely, he plus she, him plus her. Of course if you are going to revisit an earlier success it helps if you don't replicate exactly, so, in A Man and a Woman, one of the couple worked in movies, specifically as a continuity girl as opposed to a writer, director, or actor, Here it is the man, Jean Dujardin, who composes music for films and is doing so now for a new version of Romeo and Juliet set in India. In this case the woman, Elsa Zylberstein, is as far from a racing driver as you can get; she is, in fact, the wife of the French Ambassador to India. With this sort of film it helps if the two leads are glamorous; okay, perhaps the greatest example of the genre, Brief Encounter, featured two ordinary people BUT they were played by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard and, more importantly, they were working from a screenplay by Noel Coward. Lelouche is taking no chances; Elsa Zylberstein is drop dead gorgeous and Jean Dujardin has so much charm he sends the overspill to Vincent Cassell, who needs all the charm he can get. Charm + beauty is a great combination and Lelouche delivers a pleasant diversion that's definitely worth a look.