At 20, Richard takes care of his friends and girlfriends more than his mother, with whom he still lives. Divorced, Jane sometimes feels tired, very tired. She decides to carry out additional analyzes which reveal leukemia with no cure. Richard then devotes himself and finally everything to his mother...
Anouk Aimée ,who died yesterday, was never as beautiful (and lovingly filmed) as in Chouraqui's debut ; she literally shines so brightly in this somber tale that it's sometimes hard to believe she's dying of leukemia;anyway, the dialogue eschews all the tricks of classic melodrama ; no tears, no rebellion against an unfair fate, all the sentences avoid death ,but use voices filled full of hidden meanings ;if you expect "love story" you'll be disappointed .
Anouk Aimée gets good support from Richard Berry as her distraught son ,whose relationship with her mother almost verges on platonic incest ; Jacques Villeret ,for once ,is not only used as a foil to the hero,but makes his scenes count; Gabriele Ferztti ,on the other hand , has a badly written part : the cliched aging bourgeois who left his wife -why he walked out on such an attractive woman remains a mystery,considering his atttitude .
On the negative side, Iintrusive syrupy music sometimes drowns the emotion out ; the bar mitzvah celebration is pure filler,and "la Traviata" makes the movie turgid and bombastic, thus mars an intimate delicate narrative .Douglas Sirk was able to handle that :see the funeral of "imitation of life" (1959). But it was too much for a director's debut
And to treat such a subject without falling into the trap of tear-jerker is quite a feat in itself ;in spite of its mediocre rating on imdb,it's a must for fans of the late Aimée.
