Film Review
After immersing herself in two pretty bleak dramas -
Les Innocents (2016) and
Marvin
(2017), director Anne Fontaine felt in need of some light relief. Rather
than making a return to traditional rom-com territory, she opted for something
slightly different, a wacky feminist re-interpretation of a classic children's
fairytale,
Snow White. Fontaine's idea of humour isn't, shall
we say, of the conventional sort, so her take on the famous Grimm Brothers
tale is bound to take most cinemagoers by surprise, especially if they were
expecting something along the lines of the Walt Disney animation.
Fontaine's Snow White (that's Blanche-Neige to the French-speaking world)
isn't a sweet dewy-eyed innocent but a sexually precocious dazzler about
to wreak havoc in a household of seven men with more hang-ups than your average
psychiatric clinic. Never one to do things by halves, Fontaine throws
just about every genre she can think of into the melting pot and comes up
with a saucy black comedy with one hell of an identity crisis. You
could describe the film as an erotic coming-of-age comedy-thriller, but even
that hardly does it justice.
Blanche comme neige is an insanely thrown
together potpourri that filches movie references with gay abandon (Hitchcock
is ripped off left, right and centre) and leaves you wondering if it's high
time that Anne Fontaine checked into the funny farm.
In her third collaboration with screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer (after
Gemma Bovery and
Les Innocentes),
Fontaine delivers her zaniest film yet, although her well-meaning efforts
are cruelly undermined by an obvious lack of restraint on both the writing
and directing fronts. In her desire to shock and surprise, Fontaine
resorts to the kind of sensationalist crass inanity that has plagued mainstream
French comedy for the past decade and most of the humour crashes to the floor
like a large lead weight. Although the manic plot manages to keep going,
there are intervals where inspiration is distinctly lacking and it is only
the imaginative flair that Fontaine brings to her mise-en-scène that
prevents the whole thing from ending up as a hopelessly failed experiment.
Suitably cast as the super-sensual heroine is Lou de Laâge, stunning
in a role that is a complete contrast to the one she had comfortably inhabited
in Fontaine's earlier film
Les Innocentes. As Snow White's seven
dwarfs are recast as men representing seven aspects of masculinity there's
not much depth on the male side of the dramatis personae. Most of the
male characters are no more than two-dimensional ciphers, just as the dwarfs
in the original tale are entirely summed up by their names. The only
two to stand out in the male chorus are Benoît Poelvoorde and Vincent
Macaigne, although even they lack their usual crowdpulling appeal.
Most of the entertainment value is provided by Isabelle Huppert, who revels
in the role of the wicked stepmother to such an extent that you can't help
wondering if she, like Fontaine, is going slightly off the rails. A
generous dose of unbridled lunacy from Huppert and her director is, however,
just what
Blanche comme neige needs to hook the spectator and prevent
the film from being merely a lunatic exercise in directorial self-harm.
© James Travers 2019
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young woman named Claire who helped
to run a luxury hotel with her stepmother Maud. Claire was but a child
when her darling father died, and now she lives with a vain and selfish woman
who has become her deadliest enemy. Maud has long been jealous of her
stepdaughter's beauty and when the young woman steals the affections of her
lover Bernard she decides the time has come to kill the detested rival.
A stranger comes to Claire's rescue and takes her to his modest abode in
the country. Here, the young woman is befriended by seven men who could
not be more different: a hypochondriac cellist, an embittered vet, a sympathetic
priest, a pair of twins, a lecherous bookseller and a shy karate enthusiast.
Not used to female company, the men have mixed feelings over admitting the
vivacious young woman into their community. For Claire it is the beginning
of a whole new life, one of unbridled freedom...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.