Simply Perfect

Expected more

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The story is set in a small town in the Midi, in France. Throughout the film, as the characters appear, they are revealed through dialogs they carry on with each other. So, as the film goes on, we have the feeling that things are rather stuck in this place.Michel, nearly fifty, aspires to be a reporter-filmmaker that he didn't succeed to be so far. It is, actually, a clumsy, nonchalant guy, who doesn't do right what he intend to, and relieves his frustration smoking joints. He is divorced, has a teenage son with whom he spends a weekend once in a while, and is having a future less affair with Florence's sister, Agathe, who is married to Stéphane.Florence, nearly forty, Agathe's sister, is married to Stephane. They have two children. But she feels miserable with her housewife life, along with a husband who has no energy to solve the shaky family financial situation. She seems to bet on her relationship with Michel to get free from her situation. This way of seeing the future makes her a kind of a bovarist.Karim, has qualities that were frustrated by his humble origins and perhaps also because he lived all his life in a small town where the opportunities are scarce. He is the son of a maid (Mimouna) born in the Maghreb, and who works for Florence and lives in the house of this latter. Karim works as a receptionist in a small and modest hotel, down town. He is skilled in film mounting and tries to get free of his mediocre situation as a receptionist, working on projects of Michel, who rarely reach an end, because of Michel style.Agathe, lives currently in Paris (she developed a career away from that Midi where things are rather stuck). She has a comfortable social position, and is successful professionally as a politician. She visits the small town where she spend her childhood, to tackle some political issues, and problems related with the heritage left by her mother. At the beginning of history, she looks like some one who is well resolved psychologically. But throughout the film we realize that this is not true. Her passage through the small town triggers the hole story.Mimouna, mother of Karim, comes from the Maghreb. She has been working for many years for the Villanova family, since when they lived in Algeria (?). In the past, she babysitted Florence and Agathe who have a strong relationship with her. She lives apart from her husband who abandoned the family in circumstances apparently nasty.

The French are good at it. These conversation movies, there most of the action comes from the talking and there the people only exist through that.Here we meet the high-heeled Parisian feminist, who according to the rules she keeps, has decided to have a boyfriend, decided to live alone, decided to have no children. A success story, worth a documentary to the old humbug disillusioned film-maker and the younger and more idealistic Karim of Arabian origin. By the way, Karim's mother works as a maiden in the household of the high-heeled feminist's sister.This is funny and intelligent and not sensational. You won't remember it, but in some ways, you won't forget it either.

Initially this third film from triple-threat Writer-Director-Actress Agnes Jaoui (and the seventh she has co-written with Jean-Pierre Bacri) seems reluctant to surrender its riches but two and a half to three reels in we're ready to roll over and play dead once again as the old team of Jaoui and Bacri deliver yet another feast for the eyes and the ears. Their great strength as actor-writers has always been observation and recording of the minutiae of the Human Condition as it applies to what appear to be randomly linked lives and once more they draw us subtly into another microcosm of unhappy lives verging on the dysfunctional and circling like moths the light of Jaoui's feminist writer turned wannabe politician whilst working through unfinished business with her sister and agreeing to a filmed interview with two inept filmmakers one of whom (Bacri) is having a clandestine affair with that same unhappily married sister. As is sometimes the way with Jaoui-Bacri movies not that much happens except that they train a microscope on real people - there's even a short sequence in which Jaoui and Bacri study an ant carrying a twig which could be seen as an oblique comment on what they are about. Overall another satisfying movie which I shall be adding to my DVD collection as soon as it becomes available.

Agnes Jaoui's films 'Le Gout des autres' and 'Comme une image' are among my favourites of contemporary French cinema. They're smart, well-written, understated comedies that get right under the skin of middle class relationships and neuroses. As such, this, her latest, is an enormous disappointment. The humour is forced and the characters are under-drawn - what is a relatively short movie felt very long indeed. The subtlety of Jaoui's previous films was completely missing - it's as if she's aiming for a much broader audience. Fatally, almost all of the characters are completely unsympathetic - the one exception is an old North African woman played by Mimouna Hadji. I really couldn't care less about these people, their failing relationships or their political ambitions because they just didn't ring true. I suspect that this is a film that will find a limited audience outside France.