Je vous trouve très beau (2005) - film review

When his wife dies in a terrible accident, farmer Aymé Pigrenet soon discovers he needs a replacement.  It isn’t so much affection that he craves but someone who can take on the thousand-and-one jobs that his wife did and for which he is manifestly ill-equipped – complex, highly specialised tasks such as operating the washing machine without drowning his cat.   Not one for socialising, Aymé resorts to a marriage agency and ends up going to Rumania to find his new help mate.  There he finds a host of young women who are eager to be his wife so that they can start a new, more prosperous, life in France, making a useful contribution to French society as actors, singers and dancers.  The one he selects is Elena, the only one who expresses an interest in working on his farm.   At first, things start out well enough, but Aymé’s coldness quickly upsets Elena and she soon begins to regret leaving behind her old life, and her young daughter...

Actress and writer Isabelle Mergault made her directorial debut with this flimsy but engaging comedy-drama.  Despite a respectable performance from Michel Blanc, an actor with an unrivalled talent for conveying the poignancy of solitude, the film scores pretty low on the sincerity scale, thanks to the frequent outbursts of premeditated schmaltz.  On the plus side, Mergault has a genuine talent for black comedy and some of the her twisted black humour helps to take the edge off the saccharine-coated plot and cliché-heavy characterisation.  Unfortunately, the whole thing falls apart spectacularly in the last five minutes as the mother of all Deus Ex Machinas in flung at the audience with the ferocity of a force nine gale and a deluge of weepy sentimentality comes down and cruelly washes away the film’s few redeeming features.

© James Travers 2008

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