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.
© James Travers 2014
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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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.