There are a number of things that are unfamiliar to me in this film. For one, I am not in the habit of thinking of Julie Delpy in comedy roles (which probably says more about how well I’ve kept track of Delpy’s work than anything else).
For another, while Dany Boon is a headliner in this film, his role is somewhat on the periphery. Yes, he has plenty of screen time, and yes, his abilities as a comedian are used well; the thing is, though, that his character, Jean-René, is essentially a Manic Pixie Dream Girl to Delpy’s Violette.
Finally, while the film is billed as a comedy - and it is very funny indeed - it comes from a place of white-hot rage. It is hilarious, but it is also furious.
The film opens with Violette on holiday with her best friend - Parisiennes in the provinces, in the worst (that is, most snobbish) possible way. Ariane balances refinement with a crude turn of phrase and not a little impatient with her friend’s dithering over finding the perfect romance or having nothing. At her urging, Violette takes a chance with a local bumpkin (“to sweep out the spiders”) - and, of course, it turns out Jean-René is, while bereft of fashion sense and big city smarts, fantastic in bed and smitten with Violette. And, conveniently enough, moving to Paris to work on putting his financial software in a nationwide bank.
The comedy throughout the film comes from two sources; the first is that Jean-René is rather out-of-context in Paris, and completely out of it in Violette’s life. Violette is a fashion director who can rope Karl Lagerfeld into coming to a party (Jean-René starts out competently enough with Lagerfeld, but moves through a sucession of gaffes which had this hardened view of Fawlty Towers wincing at the horror of the comedy of embarrasment unfolding before my eyes; congratulating him on his “No 5” terminating the conversation), while Jean-René appears mostly genuinely unaware of how not with-it he is.
This brings us, by the way, to Delpy’s first source of anger: having co-written the film, while directing and starring in it, she us unstining in her criticism of her character. We experience the movie predominantly through Violette’s point of view, and Delpy castigates her: for a character who professes to want a loving romance, when she finds it, he concern with how Jean-René will fit in, her neurosis about betrayl and sexual health, her gossipy bitchiness, and her paranoia about aging are busy furiously undercutting her chance at something she knows will make her happy. Delpy mocks Violette, and I think the mention of Fawlty Towers is perhaps appropriate: just as John Cleese reserves his harshest humour for the kind of middle-class Little Englander he identifies as his own background, Delpy is scathing about a character who can hardly be unfamiliar for her.
The second source of humour, and conflict, is Lolo himself: Violette’s 19 year old son, who has moved himself back home after a falling-out with his girlfriend, is the tension in the story. From the trailer one might expect a typical arc: tension, conflict, and a good-natured reconciliation between the three principals, where Lolo recognises that, despite his misgivings, his mother deserves hapiness and an adult life.
No.
No, no, no.
That is not what we get. In fact, Lolo escalates the conflict with an unsuspecting Jean-René at every turn. Lolo wants his mother to himself, to wait on his every need, to get his (terrible) art in galleries, to introduce him to models, and make him boiled eggs and soldiers for breakfast. This culminates in the success of Lolo in getting Jean-René kicked out of his big business opportunity and arrested.
And this is where the real rage underlying the comedy lies: Delpy’s film is a furious litany against women being needed. Lolo himself, the brief appearances of Ariane’s daughter, and much of Violette’s professional life are built are sucking voids of neediness, and that is what Lolo inveighs against. Jea-René’s isn’t much good at fashion, or knowing which part of Paris is fashionable, or whatever, but he doesn’t need Violette. He doesn’t need her to find him a nicer apartment or help him dress better: he goes about his quotidien personal life largely off-camera, solving his own problems, and interacting with Violette because he wants her, not because he needs her. Lolo, on the other hand, wants to hobble his mother, tie her to his every whim, and is an opportunity for Deply to mock and excoriate a world that holds that the duty of women like Violette is to be obsessed with the needs of others, to the point of being reduced to little more than servitude. The happy ending of the film, therefore, is not a reconciliation, but Violette cutting herself off from that life.
Great film, raw humour, much fury. See it.