Trop belle pour toi

In this clever take on love and relationships, the affairs of three people are enigmatically portrayed. Everyone adores Bernard's wife Florence. His friends lust for her, her friends envy her. She is very beautiful, and for Bernard there is nothing more left to desire. And that is precisely what troubles him: she may just be too beautiful. His secretary, a temp named Colette, is completely the opposite to Florence. But in her physical unattractiveness Bernard finds a refuge to his peculiar dilemma. Despite of what may seem as a logical explanation, he is not plagued by an inferiority complex. What drives Bernard is the psychological force of the middle-age crisis. Some people wonder whether what they have is as good as it gets. Bernard actually knows that. The second he is near Florence he knows that that is true; gazes of his friends reassure him in that.

With Colette, however, he feels completely at ease. There is no need for self-assertion and he is free to choose. Naturally, there is much more to this film, which is full of surprises and unexpected events. The only country where such a complex and somewhat surrealistic plot could have been brought to life, where careful avoidance of turning the film into a soap opera, a pointless comedy, or a tedious drama meets with the bittersweet taste of love and desire is France, and the philosophy of love, the satire, and the superb acting -- Depardieu, Bouquet, and Balasko make a lovely team -- are also typically French here. Ironically enough, the question of the age is inverted to "what does a MAN want?"

Very few directors are prepared to take the sort of liberties Blier does, both in terms of subject matter and the manner of telling the story. "Trop Belle Pour Toi" is perhaps his most accessible film, telling the story of a successful man with a beautiful wife who unaccountably falls in love with his dumpy secretary. Depardieu is wonderful in this, utterly bewildered by his predicament, and the noted comedienne Balasko is radiant as a woman in love.

The style is almost cubist, the celebrated "beginning middle and end but not necessarily in that order", and alternative storylines are proposed and discarded at whim, to the evident confusion of some viewers. Blier has often gone all out to shock but that's less evident here, however his audacious humour remains intact. Not one for the viewer who likes to sit back and be told a straight story but for the rest of us, a joy from start to finish.

"To Beautiful For You" tells of a French car dealer (Depardieu) who is married to a beautiful women (Boquet) but falls in lust with his less than beautiful temp (Balasko). What follows is an affair and much discourse about same between husband and wife, wife and temp, temp and husband, and all permutations thereof as they ponder the meaning of love. The film is not for want of a good cast or production talent and earned respectable marks from critics and public alike. However, is suffers from obvious histrionics and didactics and an off-puting uneven flow which make for a less than immersing experience. TBFY has little nudity or sex but some very explicit language. Only for those into esoteric French films. (B)

I saw "Trop Belle Pour Toi" when it was released on the art-house theatrical circuit in the U.S. 30 years ago. This film has stuck with me since that time and still feels very true to life as our culture has become even more superficial than it was in the "go-go" '80s--particularly when it comes to definitions of beauty. The plot is simple: A rough-edged, ambitious, striving man (Gerard Depardieu at the height of his international fame) has achieved great success in the auto business, and he's acquired all the "trophies" that he may have desired: the cars, the house, the lifestyle, the almost too-gorgeous, elegant, younger wife. But he develops a visceral attraction to his secretary, who is dumpy, older, physically ordinary. They begin an affair, and he finds his lover warm, comforting, engaging and sexually exciting in ways that his very beautiful wife (crisply played by Carole Bouquet) is not.

What stuck with me about this film for 30 years is the deft way the director upends the classic interpretations of what makes someone "attractive," desirable or sexy, and what makes for a really exciting sexual and romantic relationship. The film hits some very true-to-real-life notes about what drives people in their most basic appetites and desires. Depardieu gives an engaging, visceral performance as a man having a classic midlife crisis: he's bored by his marriage to the perfect woman that everyone else envies, even though she's perfectly nice and intelligent. Every time I read or hear people saying that some famous man must be crazy for cheating on his beautiful wife or that he must be blissfully happy because his wife is a famous beauty, I automatically think of this film. I plan to watch it again soon.

Bertrand Blier's story of love at first sight between a successful auto salesman and his older, unglamorous secretary does more than simply dispel the skin-deep myth of physical beauty. Gérard Depardieu describes his new lover as "not beautiful, but nice", but his aristocratic young wife dismisses her for being 'common', setting up a conflict not between age and beauty but between opposing social classes, with a proletarian lug who married into the upper crust becoming justifiably mushy over someone less pretentious than his wife. It sounds like fun, but anyone expecting a lightweight romantic farce will be disappointed to find something closer to an intellectual exercise in style, designed around an exaggerated sense of melodrama and several odd, operatic gestures: characters thinking out loud in public or engaging in third-person soliloquies, and so forth. Not to mention, in an obscure ongoing joke, a few outspoken criticisms of the music of Franz Schubert.