C’est la tangente que je préfère (1997) - film review

Sabine, aged 15, has an extraordinary talent for mathematics.  She tries to apply her genius for logical reasoning to the rest of her life, which is not easy as her parents are constantly on the breadline and appear to resent her success at school.  Whilst Sabine is collecting money from her male friends for doing their homework, she is mistaken for a prostitute by Jiri, a 40 year old Czech playwright.  Sabine is grateful for the payment she receives after Jiri makes love to her but somehow she expects more.  When she sees Jiri with another woman, Sabine throws her cool restraint to the wind and makes a complaint about him to the police.  She soon realises she has made a mistake - but what is the solution to this complex problem...?

Open University meets Emmanuelle in this bizarre French romantic drama which should have been titled "The Mathematics of Sex" rather than referring to something as esoteric as tangents.  That, in a nutshell, is the problem with the film: it tries to be too clever and ends up looking rather silly.

The concept behind the film is appealing – a child genius attempting to rationalise her first amorous experiences through the language of mathematics – but its realisation is far from perfect.  There are a number of promising elements, but none of these is satisfactorily integrated into the narrative and the whole work feels disappointingly wishy-washy and contrived.  A generally okay script is weakened by some criminally pretentious (dare I say, hyperbolic) use of mathematical jargon, which gives a totally false impression of how a mathematically trained person thinks, even someone who is obsessed with maths.  Also, the acting rarely rises above the "could do better" level, although this mercifully avoids any discernible asymptotic tendency towards the abyss.

Another problem with the film is that it just fails to be convincing.  Julie Delarme’s character is about as believable as she is sympathetic (and she is about as sympathetic as the proof to Fermat’s last theorem, only far less interesting).  Worse, her rapport with Georges Corraface (who is clearly wasted in this film) is chilling in its frigidity.  This is despite some pretty explicit bedroom seems, which seem to have been lifted from a steamy piece of erotica (revealing far more than a few higher order derivatives along the way).

To set against such obvious failings, Charlotte Silvera’s direction is generally up to the mark, giving us plenty of reason to think that if this had been a more conventional love story, with more believable characters, we may have had a far better film to enjoy.  Alas, the main thing we can conclude from this whimsical cinematic offering, is that maths plus sex adds up to little more than a frustratingly disjointed film.

© James Travers 2003

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