La Vie d’artiste (2007) - film review

Three people in search of fame and fortune...  Alice has ambitions of becoming a well-known actress but must content herself with lending her voice to a character in a Japanese cartoon.  Unable to find the inspiration for his second novel, Bertrand ends up working as a schoolteacher.  Cora, meanwhile, is determined to make it as a singer, but for the time being she must work in a karaoke bar.  Will any of these three get to realise his or her dreams...?

Perhaps the most noticeable cultural phenomenon of the last decade has been the explosion in reality TV talent shows offering desperate wannabes the chance of immediate stardom.  Now, it seems, almost everyone thinks he or she can be a national celebrity, whereas the reality is that only a microscopically small proportion will get lucky and achieve more than their allotted fifteen minutes of fame.  In his first full length film, La Vie d’artiste, director Marc Fitoussi explores this latest get-famous-quick fad with a typically Gallic mix of humour and irony, and convinces us that the pursuit of stardom is perhaps not all that it is cracked up to be.

At a time when many aspiring young filmmakers (particularly  those who hold a French identity card) are departing  in ever greater numbers from the classical film form and pursuing stylisation to the Nth degree, Fitoussi’s mise-en-scène is refreshingly unpretentious - conventional yet subtly distinctive.  Smooth transitions between scenes (so smooth that it takes a few seconds to register that a transition has actually taken place), humour that borders on the surreal without being ridiculous and a pleasing symmetry in the narrative construction appear to be the distinguishing characteristics of this likeable new filmmaker.  La Vie d’artiste may not be brimming with originality, but it is far from mundane.  Indeed, there is an elegance to its simplicity which is extremely seductive, and which Fitoussi’s contemporaries would do well to learn from.

It naturally helps that the film has an attractive cast that is  headed by some of French cinema’s most talented actors today.   Neither Sandrine Kiberlain nor Denis Podalydès is stretched too far here (the film’s one shortcoming being the slight superficiality of the characterisation), but both give credible performances which realistically convey the hopes and frustrations of two creative types who have neither luck nor talent to help them succeed.  (Anyone hoping for a Hollywood-style happy ending will probably not like this film.)   Émilie Dequenne is even more impressive as the film’s most true-to-life character, and not just because we get to see her running about like a headless-chicken dressed in a hungry hippo outfit (although it does help).

The distinguished supporting cast includes such remarkably well-preserved relics from the French New Wave as Claire Maurier (Antoine Doinel’s mother in Truffaut’s Les 400 coups) and Jean-Pierre Kalfon (the ill-fated stage director in Rivette’s L’Amour fou).  In a way, La Vie d’artiste feels a bit like a tribute, if not a throwback, to the Nouvelle Vague, not because it apes the extreme stylisation of Godard and the more avant-garde filmmakers of that period, but because it evokes something of the exuberance and playfulness that we find in the early films of Truffaut and Rohmer, exuberance tempered by the cold kiss of mocking reality.

La Vie d’artiste is the kind of French film that can hardly fail to please a home and an international audience.  What the story lacks in originality, it more than makes up for in charm and good humour, and the presence of so many high-calibre performers, for once, does not disappoint.  Witty yet moving, the film offers a well overdue reflection on our society’s obsession with individual celebrity and happily reminds us that there is much, much more to life than instant fame.

© James Travers 2010

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?