Eli Dhrey is an insensitive boor. He’s a wealthy 60-year-old
man who casually announces to his family that his much younger 2nd
wife is pregnant, totally ignoring the distress of Dom his older married
daughter who has desperately been trying to conceive for the past two years.
His younger daughter Justine, a 27-year-old radiographer but who’s really a
frustrated artist, is living on Dom’s couch after breaking up from her last
boyfriend, is also none to happy at the news. She feels her inability to
make any romance last is due to the cold-hearted unfeeling relationship that
her father has nurtured with her. She reminds him
that as a small child her life was just a long string of his broken promises
and he simply retorts ‘as a good Jewish father, I was preparing you for
disillusionment!’
Now that the news of another baby has alienated both
his daughters, Eli thinks he can simply rectify the situation by suggesting to his wife that maybe
she has an abortion instead. An idea
that goes down like a lead balloon and gets him banished to a wall of silence at
home and to sleeping on the couch.
Eli is convinced that Justine’s long list of break ups is all down to her flightiness so he goes behind her back and continues his friendship with Atom her last
boyfriend so that maybe he can even see if he is able patch things up. And when he discovers that
Justine has already moved on and has Sami another hot young man on her arm (and in her bed)
he pays the new suitor a call at the shoe store where he works but his clumsy interfering just freaks the guy out.
Justine takes her frustration out by sneaking everyday
objects into work and surreptitiously x-raying them and turning them into
pieces of art. Sami, thinking that she
put her father up to their very creepy encounter, is not speaking to her. And Dom and Bertrand have got finally word that they
can adopt, so they need Justine to get her act together and move out of their tiny apartment. Meanwhile everyone is
ignoring Eli including his own employees, one who also once dated Justine. To try and get back in to Justine's good books Eli goes to her work place under the pretext of needing an x-ray, but when he gets one done, it actually shows that he in does in fact have a heart disorder.
When the story takes a dark twist, we suddenly realize
that Atom is not the only ex-beau of Justine that Eli has kept in contact with on a regular basis,
but much more important than that, Justine belatedly discovers that her father really did have
a heart after all.
I guess I should have started this all off by saying
that this rather twisted story is actually a funny wee comedy, and a French one
at that, and if you read this Blog regularly you will know that I believe that
they make best grown up comedies for grown ups.
It is an easygoing lightweight story about how we should maybe not take
family relationships just at face value (I can just so see Hollywood re-making it
their way). It is made so eminently watchable by such excellent performances, especially from Melanie Laurent as the frustrated and somewhat anguished Justine. The more I see of Ms. Laurent on screen ('Inglorious Bastards’, 'The Concert’,
‘Beginners’, ’The Round Up,’) the more I fall in love with her. Literally.
Only a French romantic comedy would
the leading man be 60+ plus co-star, and veteran movie actor Michel Blanc really manages to make us
like Eli even when he is behaving badly.
And I kept staring at handsome Guillaume Gouix the actor playing Sami, trying
to place him, until the penny dropped that he had starred in 'Hors Les Murs' that
had me so betwitched just last week.
If you share my love of French Comedy, you will really
like this one. If you want more darkness
in your daughter/father relationships then its probably not for you.
Due to be released in the USA very soon.
★★★★★★★★
Due to be released in the USA very soon.
★★★★★★★★
