Gerard Depardieu

DVD of the Week: Potiche

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Potiche, the delightful French farce of feminist self-discovery, is the funniest movie in over a year, and another showcase for Catherine Deneuve (as if she needs one).   DeNeuve plays a 1977 potiche, French for “trophy housewife”, married to a guy who is a male chauvinist pig both by choice and cluelessness.  He is also the meanest industrialist in France – Ebenezer Scrooge would be a softie next to this guy – and the workers in his factories are about to explode.  He becomes incapacitated, and she must run the factory.

Now, this is a familiar story line for gender comedy – so why is it so damn funny?  It starts with the screenplay, which is smart and quick like the classic screwball comedy that American filmmakers don’t make anymore.  And the cast is filled with proven actors who play each comic situation with complete earnestness, no matter how absurd.

Director Francois Ozon, best known in the US for Swimming Pool and 8 Women, adapted the screenplay from a play and has a blast skewering late-70s gender roles and both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  Gerard Depardieu plays the Communist mayor, who is both the husband’s nemesis and the wife’s former fling.   Two of the very best French comic players, Fabrice Luchini and Karen Viard, shine in co-starring roles as the husband and his secretary.

Potiche: Funny French Farce

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This delightful French farce of feminist self-discovery is the funniest movie in over a year, and another showcase for Catherine Deneuve (as if she needs one).   DeNeuve plays a 1977 potiche, French for “trophy housewife”, married to a guy who is a male chauvinist pig both by choice and cluelessness.  He is also the meanest industrialist in France – Ebenezer Scrooge would be a softie next to this guy – and the workers in his factories are about to explode.  He becomes incapacitated, and she must run the factory.

Now, this is a familiar story line for gender comedy – why is it so damn funny?  It starts with the screenplay, which is smart and quick like the classic screwball comedy that American filmmakers don’t make anymore.  And the cast is filled with proven actors who play each comic situation with complete earnestness, no matter how absurd.

Director Francois Ozon, best known in the US for Swimming Pool and 8 Women, adapted the screenplay from a play and has a blast skewering late-70s gender roles and both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  Gerard Depardieu plays the Communist mayor, who is both the husband’s nemesis and the wife’s former fling.   Two of the very best French comic players, Fabrice Luchini and Karen Viard, shine in co-starring roles as the husband and his secretary.

Blogging from Cinequest: Potiche

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This delightful French farce of feminist self-discovery is the funniest movie in over a year, and another showcase for Catherine Deneuve (as if she needs one).   DeNeuve plays a 1977 potiche, French for “trophy housewife”, married to a guy who is a male chauvinist pig both by choice and cluelessness.  He is also the meanest industrialist in France – Ebenezer Scrooge would be a softie next to this guy – and the workers in his factories are about to explode.  He becomes incapacitated, and she must run the factory.

Now, this is a familiar story line for gender comedy – why is it so damn funny?  It starts with the screenplay, which is smart and quick like the classic screwball comedy that American filmmakers don’t make anymore.  And the cast is filled with proven actors who play each comic situation with complete earnestness, no matter how absurd.

Director Francois Ozon, best known in the US for Swimming Pool and 8 Women, adapted the screenplay from a play and has a blast skewering late-70s gender roles and both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  Gerard Depardieu plays the Communist mayor, who is both the husband’s nemesis and the wife’s former fling.   Two of the very best French comic players, Fabrice Luchini and Karen Viard, shine in co-starring roles as the husband and his secretary.

Fortunately, Potiche will have an American releases on April 1.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct

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This is the riveting real life tale of Jacques Mesrine – a French criminal with a portfolio of audacious heists and even more shockingly daring escapes.  He became intoxicated by – and addicted to – his own notoriety, which he embellished with some left wing political posing.  He saw himself as a modern Clyde Barrow and positioned himself that way in the media (without thinking too much about the final scene in Bonnie and Clyde).  At the end of the day, Mesrine was just a vicious thug, although one with an unusual amount of bravado and luck.

Vincent Cassell brings Mesrine to life in a brilliant performance that does not glorify Mesrine, but inhabits a countenance that shifts  instantaneously from jokey charm to cold-blooded hatred.  American audiences may remember Cassell as the psycho Russian gangster in Eastern Promises and the suave Francois “The Night Fox” Toulour  in the Ocean’s movies.

Director Jean-Francois Richet showcases Cassell’s performance with a series of outstanding artistic choices.  The harsh violence is shown for what it is but not stylized.  Richet makes strategic use of split screen that enhances the story without distracting from it.  And when Mesrine meets his new girlfriend (Cecile De France) and she says that she’s up for anything, the movie immediately cuts to the two of them robbing a bank.  Point made.

Richet and Abdel Raouf Dafri (screenwriter of A Prophet) adapted the screenplay from Mesrine’s memoir.  Dafri has had a spectacular year in crime and prison dramas.

The entire cast is good, particularly Gerard Depardieu, who summons all his hulking menace to play a gang leader who is at least as dangerous as Mesrine.

Richet and Cassell return later this year with the second part of the story, titled Mesrine: Public Enemy #1.

Chloe and Nathalie

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Amanda Seyfried and Julianne Moore in Chloe

Chloe is a 2010 sexual thriller that is recently available on DVD.  It’s about an attractive and successful middle aged couple.  The wife has reason to believe that the husband is having an affair.  To make sure, she hires a beautiful call girl to tempt the husband.  In increasingly sexually charged meetings, the call girl reports back to her with explicit details of a torrid affair.

Chloe is a remake of the 2003 French Nathalie, where the couple is played by Fanny Ardent and Gerard Depardieu and the call girl by Emmanuelle Beart.  Now you would think that watching the mysteriously sexy Fanny Ardent become sexually obsessed and the smokin’ hot Emmanuelle Beart describing and acting out sex would be pretty darn interesting.  But Nathalie is dreary and heavy – even laborious to watch.  Despite excellent acting by its three stars, Nathalie is a failure.

Chloe is directed by one of my most admired filmmakers, Atom Egoyan (Exotica, Sweet Hereafter, Adoration) and his movie is paced much more crisply and compellingly than is Nathalie.  Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson play the couple and Amanda Seyfried plays the callgirl, and they are every bit as good as the French stars of Nathalie (and I prefer Neeson’s performance to Depardieu’s).  But Egoyan tries to spice things up even more with two new plot developments at the very end.  Because he had already made a superior version of the story, those developments are unnecessary and instead work to cheese out the film.