Je ne dis pas non (2009) - film review

Adèle is a 30-something publishing assistant who has one fatal flaw: she just cannot say no.  Everyone takes advantage of her good nature, her colleagues, her friends, and especially her collection of boyfriends.  Not surprisingly, she is starting to feel overwhelmed by the demands everyone makes of her.  One day, she meets Matteo, an Italian writer who is in search of inspiration for his next book.  Can Adèle and Matteo offer the solution to each other’s problems...?

Actress Iliana Lolitch makes a creditable directorial debut with this barbed romantic comedy - a film which provides a long-overdue antidote to the recent spate of anaemic rom-coms about 30-something professional women frantically looking for that elusive amour fou.  Whilst Lolitch’s inexperience shows both in her writing and her overly cautious direction, her first film is nonetheless an engaging piece that manages to be both irresistibly funny and truthful in its portrayal of a woman teetering on the brink of an existential crisis.  The film’s heroine Adèle - played with great charm and finesse by Sylvie Testud - is both a parody and a model of the modern sexually liberated woman, easily mistaken for Bridget Jones’s nymphomaniac alter ego.  She is confident, direct and has absolutely no difficulty attracting men to sleep with her, but whilst her life is as full as it could be, she remains desperately unfulfilled.  What she needs is old-fashioned romance - but does such a thing still exist?  

There is much to like about this film, but equally there are some pretty obvious shortcomings.  Attention-grabbing performances from Testud and her photogenic co-star, the instantly likeable Italian actor Stefano Accorsi, compensate for the film’s uneven narrative and occasional slips into cliché mode, although it is hard to forgive the slightly botched ending which, hurried and complacent, fails to provide a satisfactory conclusion to Adèle’s frenetic man-hunting saga.  How much more impactful is the earlier sequence in which Adèle attempts to confront her estranged mother in a nursing home.  So suddenly and dramatically does that scene turn from sidesplitting comedy to heart-wrenching tragedy that you can feel the laughter that is halfway up your throat do a quick about-turn and wallop you in the stomach.  With Je ne dis pas non, Iliana Lolitch shows promise as a screenwriter and filmmaker, and also provides Sylvie Testud with one of her most perfectly well-matched roles, one that makes good use of her talent for playing seemingly frivolous characters who are inwardly tormented by the bitter trauma of existence.

© James Travers 2011

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