Film Review
After two amiable offbeat comedies in the Woody Allen mould -
Two
Days in Paris (2007) and
Two Days in New York (2012) -
actress-turned director Julie Delpy turns her back on Art House
sophisticates and instead goes hell-for-leather after the mainstream
French audience in her mostly overtly commercial film to date.
Lolo, Delpy's sixth and weakest
film so far as a director, reuses several of the ideas of her earlier
films but carelessly lobs these into the kind of vulgar high concept
plot that has become
de riguer
in French comedy in recent years. The film's premise - a fraught
romance between a seemingly ill-matched couple is repeatedly sabotaged
by the woman's psychopathically possessive son - is not what you would
call sophisticated but Delpy could have made it work if she had pulled
back on the cheap gags and put more effort into making the characters
look like real human beings rather than silly cartoon characters
auditioning for parts in the next
St
Trinian's movie.
The only thing that prevents
Lolo
from being an outright disaster are the admirable casting choices,
which alone suggest that Delpy's judgement hasn't entirely deserted
her. Once again, Delpy casts herself in the lead role, playing
the kind of Gallic Bridget Jones character that she has made her own, a
middle-aged neurotic who is singularly ill-equipped to deal with the
competing demands of love, career and motherhood. Here Delpy is
joined on screen by two actors who appeared in her earlier (and far
superior) comedy
Le Skylab
(2011) - Vincent Lacoste and Karin Viard. Lacoste is the son from
Hell, a cross between the troublesome offspring in Étienne
Chatiliez's
Tanguy (2001) and Damien the
Antichrist, a likeably evil brat with the mother of all Oedipus
complexes who is prepared to go to any extremes (even fencing with an
umbrella in his underpants) to ensure his mum remains single and
unattached. Delpy's supposed best friend, Viard is almost as
grotesque - the archetypal liberated modern woman with a one-track
brain and a sewer for a mouth. With three such over-the-top
clowns vying for our attention, the film badly needs at least one more
down-to-earth character who can anchor it in something vaguely
approximating to reality, and Dany Boon fulfils this role remarkably
well in an unusually unshowy role - a welcome departure for a comic
actor who is mostly associated with lowbrow comedies such as his box
office hit
Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis
(2008).
Lolo works desperately hard
for is laughs but it bags surprisingly few, with most of the humour
falling flat as the film repeatedly sinks to the level of a juvenile
farce with a good taste bypass. The intelligence, wit and
observational flair of Delpy's previous Allenesque comedies are
conspicuous by their absence and in their place we are presented with a
vacuous entertainment that is too obviously custom-made for an
undiscriminating French cinema audience, the kind that likes to have
its gags excessively underlined in flashing red neon. This is a
shame because certain aspects of the film work surprisingly well - the
Boon-Delpy pairing is an unexpected delight and leaves you longing for
a rematch in a more sophisticated kind of rom-com that is more
obviously Julie Delpy's forte.
© James Travers 2015
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
Violette is a forty-something Parisian who leads a hectic but lonely
life in the fashion business. She is taking a thalassotherapy
course at Biarritz with a friend when she meets Jean-René, a
modest computer programmer who is getting over a recent divorce.
Jean-René makes an easy conquest of Violette, who is more than
ready for romance after years of solitude, and soon joins her in the
French capital. It's an environment that the IT specialist has
some difficulty adjusting to, although what is most likely to derail
the budding romance is Violette's son Lolo, who has no intention of
being ousted from his mother's affections by this unwelcome
stranger...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.