Schöne Venus

This stars Nathalie Baye, not Audrey Tautou, of Amélie (2001) fame. (She has a supporting role.) Baye is Angèle, a 40-year-old Parisian beautician who has loved and lost a few too many times. Indeed, as the film opens we (and Samuel Le Bihan as Antoine) watch and hear her being dumped once again. Well, she is careless with men. She is perhaps too "easy." She picks up men, the wrong ones. She is aggressive in her desire. And now she has become cynical. All she wants now are one-nights stands, no more love, no more unbreak my heart. Love is too painful.

So when Antoine falls in love with her at something like first sight (I do have a weakness for love at first sight: it is so, so daring, and so, shall we say, unpredictable) she rejects him out of hand even though he is a vital and handsome artist, confident and winning. What IS her problem? But he pursues her even though he is engaged to another (Hélène Fillières). And when she gets drunk and wants some casual sex with him, he says no. He wants her fully in control of her faculties.

So this is a romantic comedy of sorts centered around a beauty parlor. However any resemblance to Hollywood movies in the same genre (Shampoo (1975) and Hairspray (1988) somehow come to mind) is purely coincidental. Here the salon is brightly and colorfully lit with a tinker bell as the door opens, and the clientele are eclectic to say the least: an exhibitionist who arrives in a raincoat and nothing else; a rich old man lusting after Tautou; a woman with oozing pimples on her...(never mind)...etc.

What makes this work so well is a completely winning performance by Baye, sharp direction by Toni Marshall, and a kind of quirky and blunt realism that eschews all cliché. Tautou fans will be disappointed in her modest part, but she is just adorable in that role. The voyeur scene in which she is willingly seduced by the rich old guy may raise your libido or your envy depending on where you're coming from. Ha!

See this for Nathalie Baye who gives the performance of a lifetime, simultaneously subtle and strong, vulnerable and willful. She makes us identify with her character and she makes us wish her love.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)

This movie has some fine acting. It is driven by character rather than plot. Nathalie Baye, as Angèle, plays a 40ish beautician in Paris. She has had a traumatic childhood and has been burned in love so she limits herself to one-night stands where she is in the driver's seat. Then a man obsessively falls for her and she has to decide whether to open up to love, or at least the possibility of it. This does not play out quite the way it would if this were a Hollywood high concept movie.

There are many minor characters, affectionately drawn. Some pieces of Angèle's past never quite get explained or resolved, which some people might complain about, but, hey, life is a lot like that.

This film is set in Paris, right before and right after Christmas. (I also saw "La Buche" at the same theater, also set in Paris at Christmas, also very good)

The jazzy score is particularly nice.

This is not exactly an upbeat Christmas movie, but it's well worth seeing.

Angèle works in a Paris beauty salon with the ingénue-like Marie and cynical Samantha. Their boss is the supportive but businesslike Nadine (an extremely funny and perceptive performance by Ogier, one of Buñuel's bourgeois in Le Charme Discret… and the dominatrix of Schroeder's Maîtresse) who has years of experience in broken hearts and knows how to keep a professional distance. The film charts Angèle's own progress from embittered divorcée to feeling human being through her pursuit by the love-smitten sculptor, Antoine.

We first see Angèle chatting up a total stranger in a railway buffet. This is what she does. She picks up men for casual sex because her faith in the possibility of love left her when her marriage failed (actually she shot her husband, though not fatally). It is ironic, therefore, that a strikingly similar crime of passion causes a turnaround, but… enough said for now.

What delights most of all in this film is Nathalie Baye's performance. Having had to make do for much of her career with Adjani-type roles such as those in Le Retour de Martin Guerre or La Balance, she has matured to the point where at last she is being offered more interesting work. She invests Angèle with the vulnerability that we have glimpsed in the past, but which carries before it a prickly resilience necessary for survival.

Another great pleasure is the portrait of the beauty salon milieu, which lays bare -rather than covers up - human foibles with typical Gallic frankness. This is not the ersatz world of Cher in Mermaids, nor does it adopt the feminist critique that beauty products are emblems of women's self-enslavement to men. Instead it allows both humour and melancholy to let individual cases speak for themselves. The salon is a self-contained world, with its naggingly distinctive door jingle, where different solutions to the single woman's predicament are offered by employee and customer alike. Nadine tells Angèle: 'When you're not a girl any more, you'd better decide not to be a girl any more.' Samantha is promiscuous but, unlike Angèle, allows her disappointments to affect her professional life, which brings her into conflict with Nadine. But significantly when she tells Nadine where to go, while we may sympathise more with Samantha, Nadine is not made to look petty by comparison (it is possible to imagine how an American film would handle this scene very differently). Marie has a liaison with an injured pilot (Sixties matinée idol Robert Hossein) many years her senior, something Angèle finds it hard to understand until she is turned on by witnessing their nocturnal tryst. Meanwhile Angèle's provincial aunts (Micheline Presle, the director's mother and star of Boule de Suif and Le Diable au Corps, and Emmanuelle Riva, most famously of Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour - both too briefly glimpsed here) co-exist in a domestic routine which is comparatively idyllic but envy Angèle's independence and ability to live it up in the big city. No one is happy.

Clearly the sculptor, with his undemanding love, is the key for Angèle (and many another single female, no doubt!) but just how the film makes the transition from her morose rebuttals to melting acceptance is one aspect in which you may feel it betrays its Mike Leigh-style realism by opting for an ending which is too whimsical. We hope this does not spoil the many other qualities of Marshall's film.

By the same director: If you enjoy Vénus Beauté you would certainly like Tonie Marshall's earlier feature, Pas très catholique.

VENUS BEAUTY features France's fabulous Nathalie Baye, entering middle-age, as is her character (Angle) in this dramatic comedy. The Venus Beauty Salon is the location for this interesting personality study, not only of Ms. Bayes' character, but also of the personalities of her clients, admirers and co-workers. The film functions very well as a French modern slice-of-life study, across age, income, gender and social groups. Angle's pain in dealing with her sex and emotional life is very well depicted. Ms. Baye is aided by an excellent supporting cast including Samuel Le Bihan as her love interest. Le Bihan has been named France's "most promising young actor", and shows us why here. The movie really draws us into the lives of those who inhabit or pass through the Venus Beauty Institute, a microcosm of Parisian life in the 90's.

Netflix described this movie as follows: "With "Venus Beauty Institute," French writer and director Tonie Marshall takes us into this world of beauty and self image and into the lives of four strong, smart woman who make their living practicing beauty at a Parisian spa."

I was waiting throughout the entire movie for a glimpse of a strong woman...every woman in the entire movie seemed to me to be needy, insecure, wounded, angry, naive, or self destructive. The implausible plot of the very appealing Antoine, falling head over heels for Angele, I just didn't buy it. Not to mention, why did they have to make him already engaged to someone else? So throughout the whole thing, I'm feeling pissed off that he is betraying his fiance, while wooing this already completely screwed up woman, who has no faith in men already, but this guy is supposed to restore her faith in men, only he is destroying the life of another woman in order to restore the faith of this one????? The whole premise really upset me.

I just wish the movie had been described differently. As women with low self esteem and issues with men, dealing with their issues in their own uniquely unhealthy fashions.