48 heures par jour (2008) - film review

Marianne is determined to make a success of her career in advertising.  Unfortunately, her ambitions look set to be thwarted by her high-flying husband, Bruno, who expects her to look after their children and take on all the household duties.  Out of desperation, Marianne contrives a plan to force Bruno to shoulder his fair share of their domestic arrangements.  She tells him that her employer is sending her to Tokyo for a few weeks.  In reality, she intends to stay in Paris.  Bruno is not happy with this news but he isn’t prepared to show his wife that he cannot cope.  Besides, he has Marianne’s mother-in-law to help him and he can always hire someone to do the housework and look after the children.  The separation has a greater effect on Marianne, who begins to imagine all kinds of things: the children may end up as delinquents; Bruno may have a string of affairs with au pairs....  Marianne soon realises that her deception wasn’t such a good idea...

48 heures par jour is a film that attempts to make light of a serious social issue, which is the need for couples to balance the competing pressures of work and family in a world where employers expect their staff to harder and harder.  It is a subject which merits serious attention since the problem is rapidly becoming one of the great social malaises of our time.  This film does little more than remind its audience that the problem exists, using it as the starting point for a lightweight comedy which ultimately goes nowhere and feels like an antiquated piece of feminist nonsense.  In her first film, Catherine Castel shows more promise as a director than as a screenwriter.  Whilst the film is technically up to scratch, the scripting deficiencies are all too apparent – the jokes are too simplistic, the characters and situations too clichéd -  with the result that a respectable cast is pretty well wasted.  The film is watchable and mildly entertaining, but it clearly deserves to be much better than it is.

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