Embrassez qui vous voudrez

subtle, refined, typically french, investigating human relations in a more complex manner, but all with a smile on your face (a smile ?, no, sorry, A BIG LAUGH !).

LAUGHING and LAUGHING and LAUGHING !!!

VERY ORIGINAL (again - typically french)

If you like french movies you MUST see it. If not ... run away.

It was Francois Ozon's 'Swimming Pool' that really made me sit up and take note of Charlotte Rampling's suitability to french cinema. Her stern facade yet the notion she is longing for sexual freedom suits it to a 't'.

After 'Swimming Pool' I made a conscious search for Rampling's other forays into french cinema, and this is one of the surprisingly many i came up with.

'Summer Things' seemed to me a bit like a multiple brief encounter. It follows a family riddled with dissatisfaction and their friends over the course of a summer. The daughter off for a 'naughty summer'in Chicago with the boyfriend her parents don't know about, the mother off with her friends all of whom have terrible family problems themselves, and the father who spends the summer liberated from the wife he is confused by, in the arms of his transsexual lover.

The characters are all linked in such deliciously complex ways - one of the biggest links being how much they need this change, this summer to not make them change their lives as what is expected of films of this nature, but in fact to learn how to enjoy the lives they already have - this idea was so refreshing, and like 'brief encounter' what made it so real. there weren't any epiphanies, just character developments, life lessons and realisations of the fact that the grass is never as green as we hope it might be.

Watch it! :)

Those of us who like French cinema do so because, more often than not, the French display subtlety and skill in creating all sorts of different kinds of movies- light and heavy, political and whimsical. This is not one of them. In fact, other than the rampant, unapologetic sexuality, this could have been an American movie, and though I do like American movies, this is not meant as a complement. If you want a better French movie of this genre, try "The Taste of Others" or "Same Old Song"

Zillionth French "tranches de vie" comedy gets a bit upgraded through actresses Carole Bouquet and Charlotte Rampling, the only 2 likable characters in the whole flick. The rest of the cast is so obnoxious, self-centered and arrogant you dislike 'em the second they appear on the screen. Especially the oversexed 17-year old daughter, although very pretty, is as they say in French "une emmerdeuse de prémière classe" ( a first-rate pain in......).

It may fast-paced and funny in an art-house kindaway but it remains supremely annoying.

For some good recent French comedies opt instead of course for 'Amélie', or something with actor Benoit Poelvoorde (Le vélo, Dead weight,Podium)or 'Mission Cleopatre' based on the highly popular french comic books "Asterix".

'

This is one of those superficial little French comedies that finesses its way through numerous sexual liaisons and adulteries with the tolerance only the French seem to have for such things. It's actually quite amusing in an if-I-didn't-have-to-break-a-leg-to-see-it kind of way and going to see an inoffensive film with subtitles makes you look sophisticated (though this may be reduced if you see it in a popcorn munching multiplex).