Je pense à vous (2006) - film review

Parisian publisher Hermann faces a dilemma when one of his authors, Worms, writes a book describing, in intimate detail, a love affair with a woman named Diane.  Hermann intends publishing the book, even though the aforementioned Diane now lives with him and is unlikely to take kindly to Worms’s account of his former affair with her.  Life becomes more difficult for Hermann when Worms sends Diane a photograph of him in the embrace of another woman, Anne, who happens to be Hermann’s previous lover...

To date, acclaimed screenwriter and one-time film critic Pascal Bonitzer has surprisingly found little success as a director, despite a promising debut in the 1990s.   After the disappointing and frankly bizarre Petites coupures (2003) comes the even more lacklustre Je pense à vous, a pretty inept attempt at the a middle class comedy of manners.  Even though the film boasts an impressive cast, it is singularly lacking in charm, conviction and narrative thrust.  The characters are tedious stereotypes, the jokes are tired (and repeated ad nauseum), and the situations so familiar that you can hear yourself reciting the dialogue before it’s spoken.   Bonitzer is a great writer, with the potential to achieve so much as a director, and yet so little of this is evident in this depressingly trite offering.

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