Miradas ajenas

A superb comedy/drama. Agnés Jaoui, who co-wrote and directed, also has a major acting role in this story of several people who buzz around a self-centered, rich and famous writer and publisher. His teenage daughter, Lolita, who is desperate for his attention, is pretty and a talented singer, but overweight, with low self-esteem. She is resigned to guys asking her out in order to get the opportunity to pitch projects to her father. Jaoui is the Lolita's voice teacher. She also uses the young women to advance her husband's unsuccessful writing career, but later comes to regret her actions. Marilou Berry is fine as Lolita. Jean-Pierre Bacri gives a human face to the egotistical father. Bacri makes him a man who simply cannot understand how his actions – no matter how cruel – could possibly be taken badly. All of the other performers, including Jaoui, do outstanding jobs. This is the kind of character-driven comedy that we hope to get every time we see a new Woody Allen movie. But Woody has disappointed us for so long and so many times that maybe we can now recognize a new talented triple-threat. I am already looking forward to the next Agnés Jaoui film.

Comme une image (2004) was co-scripted and directed by Agnès Jaoui. (The film is known as Look at Me in the U.S. It's a reasonable title--just not the title the Director gave it.)

The plot concerns a group of educated and successful Parisians whose lives intersect in both Paris and Burgundy. The protagonist is Lolita Cassard, played by Marilou Berry. Lolita is a dedicated vocal student, whose most serious problem is that her father--played by Jean-Pierre Bacri--is too self-absorbed to pay much attention to her. Étienne Cassard is a noted author and publisher, who cares about his work, his position of power, and, to some extent, his beautiful trophy wife and their young daughter (Lolita's half-sister). Lolita's life is more trouble to him than he cares to accept, so he chooses to ignore her or belittle her.

Lolita is overweight, and acutely conscious of this because she is surrounded by elegant women of all ages who are slender. Lolita blames her problems on her weight and--reasonably enough--she can't bring herself to accept her father's lack of interest, let alone his lack of compassion.

Into this equation comes Sylvia Millet, Lolita's vocal coach. Incredibly, director/screenwriter Jaoui also stars in this pivotal role. (It's hard to believe that Jaoui can be both an outstanding director and an experienced star. It's even harder to believe that she can direct herself in such a nuanced and intelligent performance. She must be Wonder Woman!)

Sylvia has true compassion and affection for Lolita, but she's not a saint, and is not above using her influence with Lolita to advance her husband's writing career.

To my mind, Agnès Jaoui represents the perfect French film star. She looks talented, intelligent, and strong, and she's also very attractive in a non-conventional way.

One reviewer wrote, "Look at Me is about nothing and everything simultaneously." I disagree. It's not about everything, but it is about love, friendship, ambition, hurtfulness, and betrayal.

Classical music is played and sung throughout the film, and it's outstanding. Be prepared to hear songs and arias by Verdi, Offenbach, Monteverdi, and Mozart.

Jaoui (with her costar Bacri) won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes. With great acting, direction, music and script, this movie is not to be missed!

COMME UNE IMAGE (LOOK AT ME) is a tough little film that practically defies the viewer to love it. Rated as a comedy, it has few chuckles of the usual kind, but the smart tidy script delivers more of the Reformation-type comedy - wit with a bite. Writer/director and star Agnès Jaoui (her co-author is her ex-husband Jean-Pierre Bacri who also stars) is obviously an intelligent, observant, caustic chronicler of contemporary French society who dotes on celebrities at the expense of their own self-respect. Not a single character in this film is likable, but each one is fascinatingly interesting and a bit warped. Their interaction provides the venom that in Jaoui's hands raises the bar on the range of comedy.

Étienne Cassard (Jean-Pierre Bacri) is a famous writer whose latest novel has been 'transformed' into a schmaltzy film about which he is loathsomely embarrassed. He is caustic, acerbic, and emotionally negligent of both his grown obese daughter Lolita (Marilou Berry), who devotes her resentful life in an attempt to being a famous concert singer, and to his new wife Karine (Virginie Desarnauts) and little daughter. Lolita's music coach is Sylvia (Agnès Jaoui) whose demands on her students reflect her frustrated life being married to an unknown author Pierre (Laurent Grévill). Odd paths cross and it is through Lolita's influence as the daughter of a famous writer Étienne that Sylvia arranges for Pierre to join forces with Étienne and gain acceptance and popularity, but the consequences include Sylvia's increased tutelage for Lolita and her group of fellow madrigal singers.

Lolita comes the closest to being a character about whom we care. She is distraught about her weight, her distant father, her stepmother and stepsister, her inability to gain the affection for the boy of her dreams, her struggle to become a significant performer - all of which prevents her from recognizing the man who could salvage it all - Sébastien (Keine Bouhiza) who literally falls at her feet! All of these characters interact in complex and at times trying ways, ever cognizant of the 'authority of celebrity' and the results of these engagements form the body of the film. The acting is on a high level, the dialogue is crisp and smart, and the musical background for this mélange is a gorgeous mixture of classical music ranging from Buxtehude through Schubert ('An die Musik' plays a big role!) and many others. This 'comedy' is more intellectual than entertaining, but if wit and elegance of acting brings you joy, then this is a film to see. In French with subtitles at a long 2 hours! Grady Harp

Agnes Jaoui's Look at Me is an almost perfectly-pitched comic character study, a nimble, amusing and thoughtful portrait of flawed people and their unlikely relationships. The principals form their attachments through a combination of accident and ambition: Lolita (Marilou Berry), the daughter of famous writer Etienne Cassard (Jean-Pierre Bacri), seeks the aid of an overworked music teacher, Sylvia (Agnes Jaoui), in rehearsing her chorale group for an up-coming performance. Sylvia has no interest in helping Lolita, whom she considers a bit of a pest, until realizing who Lolita's father is; wishing to meet the famous Cassard, who might be able to help her struggling-writer husband Pierre's (Laurent Grevill) career, Sylvia agrees to coach the ensemble. Cassard, taken with Sylvia and Pierre, helps the fledgling author; a rave article appears in a big newspaper, and Pierre is on his way to fame and fortune. Things come to a head, however, during one of those beloved French weekends in the country (where would French cinema be without weekends in the country): Cassard demonstrates himself to be a jerk by dressing-down his young, attractive wife Karine (Virginie Desarnauts) in front of everyone; Lolita realizes that her boyfriend Mathieu (Julien Baumgartner) is only interested in her because she's the daughter of the famous Cassard; Sylvia realizes what a jerk SHE is for trying to use poor Lolita, etc., The central character, Lolita, has the misfortune of being the off-spring of a famous man; she seems doomed always to exist in his shadow, to fail in every effort to gain attention for herself (to get someone to look at her). She's overweight, and chatters incessantly, and puts inordinate pressure on herself, but Agnes Jaoui has not conceived her as a poor, downtrodden victim; instead Jaoui has made her as self-absorbed as her father, as desperate for validation, creating a dynamic between them that feels wholly convincing, the friction that always exists between family members who are more alike than they would care to admit. The other important relationship is that of Sylvia to Pierre; Sylvia seems a woman of integrity, despite her rather shameless use of Lolita to gain entrée into Cassard's circle, but Pierre, after years of struggle, seems all-too-willing to toss his principles out the window in the name of success (he appears on a ridiculous talk-show, confetti raining on his head and half-naked girls grinding in his face; Sylvia can only sit on the sofa and stare in astonishment at what her husband has gotten himself into). Jaoui's intent is to delineate these characters precisely, to sketch as minutely as possible their motives, to map out their inter-relationships. And she achieves this, without apparent detriment to the narrative which moves briskly and confidently, and with the aid of several excellent performers. Marilou Berry is both sunny and gloomy as Lolita; she has her moments of self-doubt, almost of depression, but is too fundamentally driven, too stubborn, to allow her disappointments to stop her. Her father, Cassard, is played by Jean-Pierre Bacri as a man who has bought into his own hype so completely that he's forgotten he was ever anyone other than the eminent personage he's become (he's forgotten what it was like to be young and insecure like Lolita, and behaves thoughtlessly toward her). As Sylvia, Agnes Jaoui finds a sort of middle-ground between Lolita's self-doubt and Cassard's arrogance; and as her confused husband Pierre, Laurent Grevill projects the right kind of blandness alongside the dynamic Cassard, whom he idolizes but doesn't measure up to (Cassard may be a creep, but he wouldn't be caught dead on a dumb TV show). Jaoui orchestrates the comedy proficiently, eliciting performances that strike a nice balance between comic mannerism and naturalistic credibility (Bacri is especially strong, playing Cassard with an array of tellingly affected gestures while maintaining an undertone of quiet befuddlement). The one word that sums up the movie is "balance": balance between comic intention and essential believability, bitterness and reconciliation, ambition and empathy, intimacy and discretion.

A beautifully crafted and acted film where the director Agnes Jaoui, who incidentally plays a leading role in the film supporting and coaching, Marilou Berry as Lolita a budding singer, for me the star of the film, who has to come to terms with her father's and his immediate circle of friends individualism.

As in all good films the pace is wonderful as the protagonists are slowly bought together, egos waxing and waning as they seek out what is best for themselves and to hell with everyone else. That is except for Sebastian who early in the film senses Lolita's, unbeknown to her, egalitarianism. The film ends with Lolita's awakening to the richness of a sharing society, while the director announces where her sympathies lie courtesy of the father's hi fi player.

Yet another French cultural swipe at Hollywood. Highly recommended.