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Credits
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Summary
A young make-up assistant Chloé living in Paris is making meticulous plans for
her first holiday abroad for ages. One thing needs to be sorted out: to find someone
to look after her cat Gris-Gris whilst she is away. When her gay flatmate, Michel,
refuses to help out, she looks for a professional cat carer, and eventually finds an elderly
woman, Madame Renée. When she returns from her holiday, Chloé arrives
to find Madame Renée in a state of shock: Gris-Gris has disappeared. Distraught
by the news, Chloé starts a frantic search of her area to find the missing cat,
and is surprised at the willingness of her neighbours to help her…
Review
With its contemporary setting, in an ordinary area of Paris, and naturalistic performances
(most of the cast being non-professional actors), Chacun cherche son chat is less
a story about a young woman’s quest to find her lost cat and more a portrait about
the morals and attitudes of modern society. The trivial story about the missing
cat is really just a pretext for director Cédric Klapisch to examine the psychology
and responses of individuals living in a cloistered metropolitan environment. This
may not sound like a promising recipe for a good film, but Klapisch’s flair for
capturing real-life situations on film, in a way that is familiar yet somehow fresh and
invigorating, makes this an entertaining and thought-provoking film.
Garance Clavel’s performance as Chloé is appropriately subdued but the young actress provides an essential pivot around which the drama (such as it is), and the more colourful characters, revolve. The richness of Parisian society is reflected in this film to a far greater extent than many modern French films, including representations from a dizzying diversity of races, professions, ages and lifestyles. The film’s star, if there is one, has to be the formidable Renée Le Calm, an arthritic septuagenarian who out-does her younger co-stars in charisma, charm and energy. Hers is a performance that is not easy to forget – for the simple reason that (like many characters in the film, being a non-professional actor) she is playing herself.
Klapisch originally
envisaged this film to be a short film running to around 20 minutes, but he extended it
when he discovered the wealth of material he had in the minor characters. Unfortunately,
this is all too noticeable in the final film, and it is the array of minor characters
(most notably the army of elderly women who are galvanised into action to find the lost
cat) which dominate the film, to the extent that the main characters often disappear from
view too often and for too long. Depending on your attitude to contemporary European
cinema, this is either a minor blemish or a major fault. However, it is undoubtedly
true that Klapisch shows great originality and panache in his filming, transforming a
mundane plot into a multi-faceted study of contemporary life, sometimes comic, sometimes
contemplative, yet constantly Klapisch.
© James Travers 2001
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