Le Beau monde (2014)
Directed by Julie Lopes-Curval

Film Review

The story is a familiar one.  A poor girl from the provinces with a headful of dreams makes for the bright lights of the city only to lose sight of her origins and have her allusions worn away by class prejudice.  Familiarity does have a habit of breeding contempt but director Julie Lopes-Curval just about gets away with recycling a well-worn narrative by spicing it up with a dash of auteur style that makes it relevant to a contemporary audience.  You only need to take a cursory glance at the French press to see that class barriers are as firmly established in France today as they have always been, and in her fourth feature Lopes-Curval presents a wry and mildly provocative commentary on the limits of social mobility in her country.

Le Beau monde has been likened to Abdellatif Kechiche's La Vie d'Adele (2013).  Both films offer an intimate account of an intense and inevitably doomed love affair between two people from very different social strata.  In the comparison, Julie Lopes-Curval's film comes off worse because it lacks the fierce intensity and powerful dramatic thrust of Kechiche's compelling masterwork.  What it does have, to make up for this obvious deficit, is more in the way of human feeling and tenderness, and perhaps a more typically Gallic sense of irony.  Le Beau monde may be less substantial than Kechiche's film but, being somewhat shorter and more conventional, it is a much more accessible proposition.

In her first lead role, Ana Girardot acquits herself admirably with a sensitive and nuanced portrayal of the innocent who allows herself to be seduced by her own delusions on both the professional and personal front.  Girardot (who is incidentally the daughter of the well-regarded actor Hippolyte Girardot) had previously made her mark in supporting roles in some other notable films, including Fabrice Gobert's Simon Werner a disparu... (2010) and Florent-Emilio Siri's Cloclo (2012).  As Alice, the main protagonist in Le Beau monde, the actress has no trouble engaging with her audience, even if her character isn't terribly well defined and reveals little of her inner world.  Her co-star Bastien Bouillon also deserves credit for humanising what is, by accident or design, a somewhat unlikeable individual in the classic bourgeois narcissist line.

And this brings us to the film's one inescapable flaw - its failure to develop the flawed central characters sufficiently for us to engage fully with either of them.  They remain, to a large degree, vague archetypes doing more or less what we expect them to, and so the narrative holds few surprises and feels unremittingly tame and predictable.  Lopes-Curval's interests were clearly elsewhere, in the sacred art of tapestry weaving which becomes a visual and symbolic leitmotif for the film.  With three very different films already under her belt, Lopes-Curval shows herself to be far more capable and inventive as a director than as a screenwriter.  In Le Beau monde, what particularly holds the viewer's attention is not its near-formulaic narrative but the abundance of stylistic touches that somehow elevate it above the mundane and give it a deeper meaning.  There is something of the dark poetry and wistful melancholia of Mères et filles (2009), the director's previous film (her best to date), although it lacks that film's insights into the female psyche.  Le Beau monde is a minor disappointment after Lopes-Curval's last film but it is, whilst lacking in passion and focus, a reasonably engaging saunter down a well-trodden class-conscious byway.

Film Synopsis

Alice is twenty and lives in Bayeux.  She is a woolworker who makes clothes with dyes she has created herself.  She is unsure what to do with her innate talent until she meets Agnès, a wealthy Parisian woman who helps her to gain admission to a prestigious school of applied arts.  Whilst in Paris, Alice meets Antoine, her benefactor's son, and it isn't long before the two are deeply in love.  In Alice, Antoine is pleased to discover a sincerity and naivety which sets her apart from the bourgeois milieu which he despises.  For her part, Alice is enchanted by the world that her lover offers her with such unreserved generosity...