Poupoupidou (2011)
Directed by Gérald Hustache-Mathieu

Film Review

Five years after his oddball debut feature Avril (2006), a graphic account of the sexual awakening of a young nun, director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu returns with an even more unlikely scenario, one that sees a pulp fiction crime writer falling in love with a dead Marilyn Monroe look-a-like.  If you think that sounds like the premise of a Coen brothers comedy, you wouldn't be wide of the mark.  Hustache-Mathieu clearly had the Coen brothers in mind when he conceived this gloriously contrived mélange of film noir murder mystery, black comedy and off-the-wall romance, with Fargo (1996) being an obvious point of reference.  The basic plot (a man falling in love with a woman whilst investigating her murder) appears to have been lifted from Otto Preminger's Laura (1944) and the sustained mood of eeriness owes everything to David Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks (1990-1).  There are sly homages to Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003), and so many allusions to the films and life of Marilyn Monroe that it would take several weeks to list them all.

All this would seem to suggest that Poupoupidou hasn't a spark of originality in it, but that is far from being the case.  Tempting as it is to write it off as a derivative smash-and-grab raid of others' work, this is actually one of the most inventive, absorbing and stylish French 'polars' in years, a film that makes death-defying leaps from electrically charged thriller to comicbook-style comedy and back again with startling ease.  It's a cinephile's delight and movie addicts will doubtless enjoy spotting the hundreds, if not thousands, of cinematic references that Hustache-Mathieu somehow manages to cram into the film's dense 100 minutes of runtime.  But Poupoupidou isn't just a freakishly overdone tribute to (predominantly American) cinema.  It's also a highly entertaining film that deals imaginatively with themes around identity and the personal quest for truth that give it a far wider appeal.

Beneath the slightly soiled trappings of the trashy American crime novel, Poupoupidou offers a thoughtful study in identity.  The four main characters in the film - a hack crime writer, a Monroe-like starlet, a frustrated young cop and a toe-curlingly synthetic career politician - all have one thing in common: a need to re-invent themselves.  Through lack of self-esteem or a fear of facing who they really are, each of these four adopts the persona of an easily recognisable American archetype.  In each case, the borrowed identity brings disaster or disillusionment, and if the film has a message it is that you can never be happy by trying to be someone else - as one Norma Jean Baker found to her cost.

Monroe's tragic life story provides the basis for what is, by any standards, a ludicrously contrived plot.  Incidents in the actress's life are picked over and exploited for dramatic and comedic effect, so that the film's heroine, Candice Lecoeur (a wink to Sugar Kane Kowalczyk), and Marilyn Monroe become almost one in the same.  The net result is that you end up half-convinced that Monroe did not take her life but was in fact the victim of a fiendish political cover-up.  (I always thought JFK was too good to be true.)   Sophie Quinton, whose talents were first revealed in Hustache-Mathieu's debut film, has something of Monroe's mystique and enticing allure, so much so that her doomed Candice looks like a plausible reincarnation of Hollywood's most recognisable icon.  Like the real Monroe, Quinton's near-facsimile is a lost soul desperately looking for an identity - Belle de Jura (you have to be a Buñuel fan to get that joke) is the closest she gets.  Quinton's character may be stone dead before the drama kicks off, but, like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard (1950), such devices as the flashback and après vie monologue ensure that she has a constant, haunting presence.  Icons are, by their very nature, immortal.

As alluring as Quinton is, hers is not the most interesting character that Hustache-Mathieu hurls in our direction.  Far more intriguing is Jean-Paul Rouve's laid back impersonation of a poor man's Philip Marlowe.  Like the great Patrick Dewaere (whom he bears an uncanny resemblance to in this film), Rouve is at his best when he is cast as the down-at-heel loser or congenital outsider, so he is well-suited to play an insecure, socially inept writer who has yet to work out the plot of his own life.  It's the kind of 'accidentally likeable' character that Rouve inhabits most easily, and in doing so he acts as an effective conduit for the film's darkly humorous digressions.  One of the film's strengths is his unlikely pairing with an actor of an altogether different school, Guillaume Gouix.  Playing a young police officer who fancies himself as an FBI agent, Gouix is almost the exact mirror image of Rouve, his external Delon-esque coldness belying the childlike gentleness within - a kind of sheep in wolf's clothing.  Rouve and Gouix make such an engaging team (note the subtle homoerotic edge to their slightly awkward relationship) that you can easily envisage them headlining a popular TV crime series.

Poupoupidou has a strong premise and some great performances, but what makes it so memorable is its striking visual composition.  The location chosen for the film is Mouthe in the Franche-Comté region of east France, a town whose main claim to fame is that it recorded the lowest ever temperature in France (minus 36.7° C).  Set in the Jura mountains, it evokes the wild open spaces of America and when the snow comes in the winter it becomes a veritable no man's land.  It is this oppressively bleak yet beautiful expanse of pristine nothingness that Hustache-Mathieu's cinematographer Pierre Cottereau exploits so marvellously in this film, not only to lend atmosphere and a sense of menace to the narrative but also to provide a wry visual metaphor for the emptiness of the lives of his protagonists, who resemble lost souls frozen in a perpetual winter.  Oh, and it also gives the film its funniest sequence, a toboggan ride from Hell that would not be out of place in a Laurel and Hardy film or Bruce Willis action extravaganza.  That just about sums up Poupoupidou - a dizzying roller coaster jaunt across terrain that is both sickeningly familiar and unsettlingly weird.  It's a spicy concoction, whose abundant eccentricities include gratuitous flashes of full-frontal male nudity and a gag involving a deceased Saint Bernard that is way off the scale of political incorrectness, but then, to coin a phrase, some like it hot...

Film Synopsis

David Rousseau is a successful writer of crime novels but lately his inspiration appears to have deserted him completely.  Stricken with a severe case of writer's block, he decides to take a few days' rest in the country.  So, leaving his cosy Parisian apartment behind him, he heads for Mouthe, a backwater town which is reputed to be the coldest place in France.  David's arrival coincides with the sudden death of Candice Lecoeur, a stunningly beautiful blonde, who models herself on the famous actress Marilyn Monroe.

According to the police investigation, Candice committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping tablets.  When he hears of this, David is sceptical - the parallels with Monroe's own supposed suicide in the 1960s are just too striking to be mere coincidence.  With nothing better to do with his time, the writer begins his own investigation into Candice's death and quickly develops a morbid fascination with her past life as he is drawn ever deeper into a labyrinthine intrigue.  If he ever manages to unravel the mystery, David knows he will have a superb plot for his next novel.  Unfortunately for him there are some shady individuals who are determined that the truth will never come out...