Pièce montée (2010) - film review

Vincent and Bérengère are young and deeply in love, but are they sufficiently committed to one another to get through the one great ordeal of their lives, their wedding day?  The couple would have preferred a quiet, modest affair, but to please their families they agree to a grand traditional wedding with all the trimmings.  As the guests begin to assemble at the church, the first notes of discord are sounded.  It isn’t long before Vincent and Bérengère begin to realise that perhaps they are not suited to one another after all...

Those who are not experts in the sacred art of cake-making may be interested to know that a Pièce Montée is a cone-shaped wedding cake whose main ingredients (profiteroles) are held together with caramel.  It is an over-sugared and flimsy-looking Phallic representation which looks as if it may collapse at any moment in a horrible gooey mess (not the most optimistic of symbols for a wedding day).  The same description could just as easily apply to Denys Granier-Deferre’s film of the same name, a toothless adaptation of the award-winning satirical novel by Blandine Le Callet.  This sticky concoction of clichés and saccharine sentimentality is about as palatable as the culinary nightmare which gives it its title, but it has two things in its favour - the rivulets of dark humour that run through it and the incomparable pairing of Danielle Darrieux and Jean-Pierre Marielle, two of the last surviving monstres sacrés of French cinema.

The film is directed (if that is the word) by Denys Granier-Deferre - son of the well-regarded French filmmaker Pierre Granier-Deferre, who helmed such popular films as Le Chat (1971) and La Veuve Couderc (1971).  Granier-Deferre Junior’s filmmaking career got off to a flying start, with Que les gros salaires lèvent le doigt ! (1982) and Réveillon chez Bob (1984), but after the box office failure and critical onslaught that greeted Blanc de Chine (1988), he turned his back on cinema and embarked on a very successful career as a director for French television.   Pièce montée comes 16 years after Denys Granier-Deferre’s last film for cinema, Coma (1994), so it is hardly surprising that it resembles a TV movie, and a pretty lacklustre one at that.  If it had been made for television, the film would probably have fared somewhat better.

On the plus side, Pièce montée has an excellent cast, that includes (in addition to the aforementioned cinema legends) such magnificent performers as Jérémie Renier, Julie Depardieu, Aurore Clément and Léa Drucker, although you’d be hard pressed to find a single character in the film who is not an outright caricature of the silliest kind.  The seemingly endless barrage of banal comic situations rapidly becomes tiresome, and it doesn’t help that most of the gags are so well-worn that they ought to covered in patches.  Weddings lend themselves supremely well to black comedy, so it is surprising that the film does not capitalise on this and instead spends most of its time doling out sitcom-style gags that ought to have been pensioned off years ago.

It is easy to see how much better this film could have been.  Denys Granier-Deferre and his screenwriter Jérôme Soubeyrand have clearly missed an opportunity to deliver a really funny assault on the phoney conventions that still prevail amongst the snobbish middle classes, as well as making some meaningful observations on how marriage is perceived by society today.  What could have been a mordant social satire is, through a combination of lazy screenwriting and uninspired direction, no more than a rather tedious lowbrow farce that would have been out-dated if it had been made in the 1990s.  Fortunately, a magnificent duo (Darrieux and Marielle) are on hand to perform a much-needed salvage operation (with tenderness and humour) - although their efforts to inject some class and backbone into the film are only partly successful and it still remains a pretty spineless comedy.  It does not help that the same subject has been treated far more imaginatively in recent years, for example by Valérie Guignabodet in Mariages! (2004), a film that is not only a lot punchier, but also much more true to life.

© James Travers 2011

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