Juliette et Juliette (1974)
Directed by Rémo Forlani

Film Review

A limp satire on the feminist movement that had just begun to make its presence felt in France in the early 1970s, Juliette et Juliette boasts a terrific cast but it fails to make much of its half-decent premise.  A welter of mostly misfired gags merely distract us from a lumbering plot, with the result that the film fades from memory even as you sit watching it.  No wonder it has been all but forgotten.  The most interesting thing about the film is that it is the sole feature to be directed by Rémo Forlani, a man of multiple talents, although he is most famous as a French radio presenter.  Forlani has several books and stage plays to his name, and he was also a successful screenwriter, best-known in this capacity for the two live-action Tintin films he scripted in the 1960s - Tintin et le Mystère de la Toison d'or (1961) and Tintin et les Oranges bleues (1964).  He also  penned the cult gangster film La Bande à Bonnot (1969) starring Jacques Brel.

Juliette et Juliette deals with a subject (albeit pretty cack-handedly) that was close to the heart of its lead actress Annie Girardot, which could explain why she was also the film's producer (along with her husband at the time, Renato Salvatori).  Throughout the seventies, Girardot demonstrated her support for feminism by taking on a succession of tough female roles that made her appear the butchest and most resilient screen actress in France.  In Forlani's film, let down by a weak script, she fails to be much more than a caricature of the independent modern woman, although her pairing with a similar tough cookie, Marlène Jobert, is nothing less than inspired. Both actresses deserved better but they make the most of the derivative material they are given, showing that feminism can be a social virtue if tackled from the right angle.  By contrast, Pierre Richard is completely wasted in the lead male role and merely knocks out another of his comic loser portrayals, a pathetic specimen of manhood intended presumably to ensure that our sympathies are completely monopolised by the battling female protagonists.

Up-and-coming performers Philippe Léotard and Daniel Prévost appear all too briefly in the film and are its most squandered asset, and the same goes for Alfred Adam and Paulette Dubost, two fondly remembered relics of a much earlier era of cinema, reduced to earning a living in low-grade fare such as this in their declining years.   Juliette et Juliette is silly and superficial, written and directed with scarcely detectable flair, but, thanks to its charismatic lead actresses, it's slightly more fun than attending a feminist rally in your underpants. It's hard to gauge what impact the film had on women's rights but it is a fact that its main bone of contention - the right to have an abortion - was satisfied the following year, with the introducing of the Veil Law.  Not a bad result for a still-born comedy.

Film Synopsis

Juliette Vidal is a journalist who works on the popular woman's magazine Pénélope, primarily in the role of an agony aunt.  She organises a competition to find the magazine's ideal reader, but the winning photo gets mislaid and someone else is selected at random.  That lucky lady is Juliette Rozenec, an employee in a department store who is married to Bob, an amateur boxer who reluctantly works for his parents in their pancake house.  The result of the journalist's attempt to compile a profile on her busy namesake is a shocking article which, together with the inclusion of a nude male centrefold in the magazine's next addition, costs her her job.

When the other Juliette is also dismissed the two angry women get together and create their own ultra-feminist magazine, Les Femmes en colère, to promote the rights of women and militate for abortion.  As Juliette R. falls out with her husband, only to discover his unexpected capabilities as a lover, Juliette V. falls head over heels in love with Laurent, an ecologist from Canada.  The women's amorous exploits will tame their hostility towards the male sex, and in the end it is Bob and Laurent who are in revolt - against society's ill-treatment of men!