Voulez-vous danser avec moi? (1959) - film review

When Virginie meets Hervé Dandieu, a dentist, it is love at first sight and they soon marry.  However, it isn’t long before they begin to fall out and start bickering over everything.  After one of these rows, Hervé leaves their apartment and goes for a walk.  He ends up in a night club where he falls under the spell of Anita Flores, a seductive dancing instructor who takes him back to her flat.  What Hervé doesn’t know is that he is being followed by a man named Léon, who takes some compromising photographs of his shared moments of intimacy with Anita.  It is a scheme cooked up by Léon and Anita so that they can extort cash from Hervé.  Virginie overhears Anita when she visits Hervé at his dental surgery to blackmail him and arrange a meeting at the dance school.  On the day of this meeting, Virgine decides to show up, only to find Anita lying dead on the floor.  To prove Hervé innocent, she must begin her own investigation to identify the real killer...
© Willems Henri (Brussels, Belgium)

Brigitte Bardot’s third collaboration with director Michel Boisrond is as limp-wristed and humourless as their previous cinematic blunders and is clearly nothing more than a cynical attempt to cash in on Bardot’s sudden elevation to the position of international sex goddess.  The plot, a pedestrian whodunit of the most tedious kind, loses the audience’s attention within about five minutes, such is the calibre of the writing, direction and acting.  Voulez-vous danser avec moi?  will doubtless have some appeal to the dirty mac brigade, who will relish the sight of Bardot frolicking about in skimpy outfits and igniting Henri Vidal’s libido with her naughty girl routine, but for the rest of us it’s boredom all the way.  No wonder the film was a box office flop.  The only thing remotely interesting about this film is that it marked the screen debut of a certain Serge Gainsbourg...

© filmsdefrance.com 2011

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