Cause toujours... tu m’intéresses! (1979) - film review

After his divorce, François Perrin, a French radio journalist, finds his new solitary life increasingly unbearable.  One evening, he picks up his telephone and dials a number at random.  As luck would have it, the person on the other end of the line is not only of the opposite sex and of his age group, but she is also as desperately lonely as he is.  Christine, a pharmacist, has not had a man in her life for years and when she receives this importunate phone call she is far from vexed.  Taking care to conceal his identity by disguising his voice and using a false name, Thibaud, François rings Christine several times before they finally agree to meet.  All the signs look good, but at the last minute François’s timidity gets the better of him.  Unable to introduce himself as Thibaud, he instead presents himself to Christine as a complete stranger.  Despite his best efforts, she seems strangely impervious to his charms...

Having scored notable successes with L’Emmerdeur (1973) and La Cage aux folles (1978), director Edouard Molinaro and screenwriter Francis Veber subsequently pooled their resources to deliver another classic comedy.  Despite being the least well-known of their collaborations, Cause toujours... tu m’intéresses! is arguably their most sophisticated film, a bittersweet romantic comedy that offers a mature and thoughtful reflection on solitude and the difficulty of finding that elusive soul mate.  The film marks the return of François Perrin, Veber’s recurring everyman character, who was previously played by Pierre Richard in Le Grand blond avec une chaussure noire (1972).

There is a genuine charm to this film, with derives principally from the delightful on-screen chemistry between the two lead actors, Annie Girardot and Jean-Pierre Marielle.  These two first rate performers are as adept at playing drama as comedy and both bring a reality and subtle poignancy to their portrayal of two middle-aged lonely hearts.  In addition to the humour, which is slickly rendered by the screenwriter and the actors, there is also more than a hint of pathos, reminding us that comedy and tragedy are inextricably intertwined.

Veber’s penchant for the burlesque is very much in evidence in two memorable sequences.  The first is the one in which Girardot and Marielle meet for the first time.  Marielle cannot go through with the meeting and ends up having to watch Girardot accost a stranger who, naturally, assumes she is a woman of easy virtue.  Marielle manages to save the situation (just), but still cannot reveal who he is, so he ends up playing his own rival for the rest of the film.  The second excursion into farce comes when Marielle gets into an argument with a sarcastic traffic warden, and the two end up scrabbling in the mud like a pair of schoolboys.  A propos, the warden in question is played by Michel Blanc, another comedy legend of French cinema who had just found celebrity through his appearance in the Bronzés films.  It’s a small world, n’est-ce pas?

© James Travers 2010

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