Enfin veuve (2008)

Enfin veuve is a French film comedy-drama first released in 2008, directed by Isabelle Mergault.  The film stars Michèle Laroque, Jacques Gamblin, Wladimir Yordanoff, Tom Morton and Valérie Mairesse.  Our overall rating for this film is: mediocre.


Anne-Marie has just lost her husband in a car accident, but she is far from being the grieving widow. She has been having an affair with another man for the last two years and now, finally, she can marry him.  Or so she thinks.  The one thing she hadn’t banked on was the tidal wave of good will from her family.  To help her get through her grief, the whole family turns up to stay with her.  Now Anne-Marie finds that she is even more of a prisoner than when she was married...

The promise that stage actress-turned director Isabelle Mergault showed in her first film Je vous trouve très beau (2005) is conspicuous by its absence in her follow-up feature, a modern day reworking of The Merry Widow.  Mergault’s mise-en-scène is as uninspired and rudderless as her writing, so what we have is a tedious attempt at a comedy of manners that is swamped in cliché and contrivance, with characters so dull and superficial that you would hardly notice if they were replaced en masse with cardboard cutouts.  It does not help that the film has something of a crisis of identity.  It starts out as a light-hearted comedy, stuffed with jokes of unimaginable crassness, and then suddenly goes all serious for no apparent reason.   Just what persuaded actors of the calibre of Michèle Laroque and Jacques Gamblin to participate in this fiasco is a mystery but their combined efforts go someway to salvaging a pretty dismal film.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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