Cliente (2008) - film review

50-something Judith is the host of a popular television shopping programme.  After her divorce, she lives with her sister and closest confidante, Irène.  Outwardly, Judith is self-assured, happy and well-adjusted, but she has a dark secret.  She frequently makes use of male prostitutes, whom she picks out on the internet.  This is how she came to meet Marco, her favourite on account of his charm, boyish good looks and thoughtfulness.  He also knows how to give her a good time, and for a very fair price.   But, unbeknown to Judith, Marco is Patrick, a married man who struggles to make ends meet as an interior decorator.  His wife, Fanny, has no idea of the lengths he must go to to supplement his income to keep her and her family in the manner to which they have grown accustomed.  When she finds out, Patrick’s life is set to become very complicated...

In adapting her best selling novel Cliente, the multi-talented Josiane Balasko offers a provocative and thoughtful reflection on the traumas the career-minded modern woman faces as she attempts to balance her need for freedom with her need for romance.  Such is the controversial nature of the film’s basic premise that Balsako had considerable difficulty bringing it to the screen and it was only after her novel proved to be a major highstreet success that she could find a backer willing to take the risk.  Balsako is no stranger to controversy.  Her 1995 film Gazon maudit broke new ground with its daring portrayal of lesbianism.  Her latest film tackles a subject that is perhaps even more of a taboo, the idea that a successful middle-aged woman must resort to using male prostitutes because she lacks the time and emotional wherewithal to find a bedfellow by more conventional means.

Whilst the film certainly takes us into pretty unfamiliar territory, which is commendable, Balasko’s tendency for over-simplification and needless vulgarity undermines her message somewhat, with the result that the film is far more conventional and uninteresting that it deserves to be, certainly from the point of view of its screenwriting and mise-en-scène.  What rescues the film and gives it impact is the inspired casting of Eric Caravaca and Nathalie Baye for the two lead roles, two exceptionally gifted actors who take Balasko’s coarse, poorly developed material and perform a special kind of alchemy on it.  Baye is particularly good at playing independently minded women whose apparently passionless exterior is tragically belied by an apparent inner romantic yearning, so she is perfectly cast as the heroine of the film and gives it the focus and emotional force it needs to sustain it.  Caravaca is equally effective in the role of the jobbing builder who moonlights as an escort, torn not only between the emotional needs of his wife and paying clients, but also two wildly contrasting lifestyles.  Caravaca is the kind of actor who can sail through virtually any role on his charm and good looks alone, but here, as ever, he invests far more in his portrayal than the merely superficial and, as a consequence, he gives the film its more poignant and profound moments.  It is no accident that the most hauntingly beautiful passage in the film is the one that follows him on a journey of solitary introspection through the streets of Paris.

On the downside, virtually every other character in the film is a pretty blatant caricature and, lacking much in the way of substance but taking up far too much screen-time, they serve merely to provide an unwelcome distraction from the compelling central story strand involving  the two main protagonists.  Do we care about Judith’s happy-go-lucky sister, a parody of Balasko herself (not surprisingly, as she is played by Balasko)?  Are we bothered by the grotesques (doubtless based on the three witches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth) that make Patrick’s domestic life a misery?  Do we give a Dutchman’s damn about Patrick’s morally vacuous, constantly snivelling wife (Isabelle Carré in possibly her worst screen performance to date)?  It is as if Balasko was so artistically drained by the process of creating her main characters that she just couldn’t be bothered to do more than sketch out all of the others, resorting to the kind of shallow characterisation you’d expect to find in a low-grade sitcom or American teen comedy.  If she had only shown a little more care with her script-writing (or, better still, had engaged the services of a more talented screenwriter), Cliente could easily have been her magnum opus, rather than a film that is only fleetingly brilliant but overall is patchy and largely forgettable.

© James Travers 2011

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