Faut que ça danse!

Growing old without noticing Lvovsky's a triple threat. She writes, she acts, and this is her fifth feature directorial effort. Much of her work has been with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who directed her in her film 'Actresses', which was part of the 2007 New York Film Festival. This new movie is built around the charming, shambling 76-year-old Jean-Pierre Marielle, who was seen in 'Gray Souls'/'Les ames grises' (in the 2006 Rendez-Vous), 'The Da Vinci Code'; and he is involved in four 2008 films. Salomon Bellinsky (Marielle) is a French Jew who laid low om a cellar, rumor has it, during the war; his family was wiped out; he prefers not to discuss the Shoah or what he was up to at the time himself. He has a long-estranged wife, Geneviève (Bulle Ogier), a sweet little lady who's losing her marbles and is cared for devotedly by a certain M. Mootoosamy (Bakary Sangaré). Is the latter supposed to be Indian? He appears to be a Hindu and the film opens, a bit strangely, with him and Geneviève at a religious festival in India.

Bruni-Tedeschi has to be on hand, of course, and she is Sarah, Salomon's rather distracted daughter, who narrates, and who has a nice calm orderly man in her life called Francois (Arié Elmaleh), who does things with mice and is good at fixing things.

What about the title? Well, Salomon goes to a tap dancing class for older folks, and loves to watch Fred Astaire movies at home on DVD. He's a liver; he wants to enjoy whatever amount of life he has left (but he reminds his family how long the Old Testament prophets lived and won't rule out surviving at least another forty years). Salomon is a sprightly old guy, and he runs an ad to find a girlfriend. After a number of failures, he lands Violette (Sabine Azéma: 'La Buche,' 'Coeurs,' etc., etc., rather in 'Annie Hall' mode here), and they have good times. Maybe "Let's Dance" also means "let's survive" or "let's move on." Sarah has always been told she can't get pregnant, and she does, and has her baby, on screen--comedy heaven, of a sort, since comedy is about bringing people together, and this brings the family to her hospital room, though she's had the baby in odd circumstances, at a psychiatric clinic, watched over by a shrink, and a nurse who runs off for hot water and clean towels because that's what they do in the movies. Survival is tougher for Geneviève, though she's blithely unaware of it. She's given away her money and even her furniture, and when she and M. Mootoosamy go to Zurich to check on a bank safe deposit box, the stack of cash they retrieve from it comes to grief. Salomon likes to gamble away his disposable income though, and one day without in the least wanting to, winds up with a large sum, which he forces on M. Mootoosamy--so Geneviève never winds up on the street, nor does the good Mootoosamy.

Any direct resemblance between all this and everyday life is absolutely coincidental and surely minimal. It's just a warm, humane diversion about Jewishness, old age, having fun, and learning to live. One can watch it for Jean-Pierre Marielle; but Ogier, Bruni Tedeschi, and Azéma have their fans too.

Shown as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, February 29-March 9, 2008, Let's Danse!/Faut que ça danse ! opened November 14, 2007 in Paris.

Ms Lvowski is well known only to her friends, who wrote apologetic reviews of her last movie in LE MONDE or NOUVEL OBS, but may be hardly located somewhere between Lubitsch and Minnelli.However, she had a rather good script, six fantastic actors and even a cartoonist who designed for her some funny cartoons, including an assassination of Hitler - nothing less. The trouble with this movie is that it is a mixture of good acting and hasty editing, probably due to the fact that money was scarce and after paying the main cast, there was little left for a careful editing. There are some sequences which are funny, all the actors are doing their best, with special notations for Azema and Marielle, but some sequences - such as the delivery of Ms. Bruni-Tedeschi (an awful name to spell for ordinary French people)'s baby, are beyond the limits of the widest patience. The reviewer of PARISCOPE who qualified this film as "light as a Fred Astaire movie" and Bulle Ogier's Alzheimer as "infantile" should be condemned for imbecility. Ms Lvovsky is to appear in a next-to-come movie. I am not anxious to see it.harry carasso, Paris, France

I really liked the lightness and deepness of this story about a weird french family. The characters, especially Simon (astounding Jean-Pierre Marielle) are all endearing. It's a very rich subject, a very personal and yet entertaining movie. The birth scene in the end is funny and moving. The problem of that movie is that not much of it remains after the end. I feel sympathy for it but not as much as for another Noemy Lvosky movie witch I loved, that's called "La vie ne me fait pas peur". Maybe youth was more attractive for me than old age and maturity, may be Noemie wanted to make a popular movie, and that's a tricky thing to attempt, because when you want to enlarge your audience, you sometimes lose something. But all in all, a good film.