|
"O! for a muse of fire..." Carousel music announces the flesh-bound tableau, a languid dolly-in as the passionate couple humps away beneath a print of the Mona Lisa, framed by beaded curtains. The aspiring novelist (Jean-Hugues Anglade) is happy just to paint beachfront bungalows, Betty (Béatrice Dalle) is Catherine from Jules and Jim, given the same awed-horrified voiceover treatment ("She could never bear immobility... The world is too fucking small for her"). They enjoy each other lavishly, "the forecast was for storms." In a fit she throws out his belongings and torches his shack, as a waitress she negotiates a crabby client with a fork to the arm. Upon discovering her lover's unpublished manuscript mid-tantrum, she raptly reads it in one sitting and proclaims it a masterpiece. (The critic who dubs it "amusing but unbearable" gets his cheek slashed with a comb.) Jean-Jacques Beineix's rollicking view of l'amour et la mort, fixed as a boiling pot that keeps spilling over. The protagonists are contrasted with two other couples, the gal-pal with her hipster beau (Consuelo De Haviland, Gérard Darmon) and the store owner with the inflamed wife (Jacques Mathou, Clémentine Célarié), but the road to madness is their own. The garbageman tearing into a mattress with his hook hand and the highway patrolman misty with paternal solidarity are only two examples of Beineix's comic ease, the bogus pregnancy and the tacky heist attest to his mercurial juggling of moods. A joke on carnal inspiration and bad writing (cf. Polanski's Bitter Moon), "a flower with psychic antenna and a tinsel heart." The journey flows in a lambent pop style (Dalle in a red dress sitting atop a lemon auto under a cobalt sky), warm to the touch and scarily intimate. The concurrency with Demme's Something Wild is instructive. With Vincent Lindon, Jean-Pierre Bisson, and Dominique Pinon.
--- Fernando F. Croce |