Rien sur Robert

A genuine comedy of manners and mores with razor sharp timing and a troupe of actors, including the inimitable Michele Piccoli, who can convey a vast range of feelings with the slightest nuances of gesture or tone. The story of a French critic most famous for reviewing a film he never saw and the ups and downs of his love life is especially delicious if you are familiar with the hothouse atmosphere of French intellectual life. But the French gift for portraying the childish emotions that beset adult activities makes this film enjoyable for a wide audience.

"Nothing about Robert" is the description of empty, mediocre, hateful and paranoid existences... If the leading characters declare once in a while their love, they really like to let suffer each other. Is it a comedy or a drama? Is there even a plot? I had the pleasure of watching this unclassifiable movie because the characters in their vileness and outrageousness make one laugh. I loved their complexity which makes them at the same time close and odious. Especially, I discovered Valentina Cervi, actress with a very disconcerting performance, which interprets an exoplanet in the intellectual Parisian microcosm. Luchini is faithful to himself i.e. one always wonders from when he does a little too much. Sandrine Kiberlain is perfect in all the details.

The character of Didier, whose troubles all begin when he gives a bad review of a film he hasn't seen, was apparently based on a real-life critic who made a similarly lazy judgement about Emir Kusturica's "Undergound". From this starting point, Pascal Bonitzer gives us a humorous portrait of a superficial, middle-class writer who is about to reap the consequences of his intellectual and emotional dysfunctions.

Fabrice Luchini's deadpan, wide-eyed performance as the constantly non-plussed critic who lurches from one embarrassing predicament to another is perhaps the film's main delight. So much so, in fact, that it comes as a slight disappointment to discover the story developing into a conventional relationship dilemma: will Didier settle with his promiscuous fiancée Juliette (Sandrine Kiberlain) who takes a sadistic pleasure in humiliating him at every opportunity; or will he end up with the crazy, masochistic Aurélie (Valentina Cervi) who is Juliette's complete opposite?

While far from the best example of its type, this is a perfectly decent French relationship comedy, well acted and directed, darker and broader than Rohmer, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny (particularly in the scenes between Luchini and Kiberlain), and utterly inconsequential (well, the title does sort of warn us about that).

It has a great final line, by the way.

I think people were confused that there were no heroes and heroines. Just flawed people trying to hide their imperfections and behave in a polite bourgeois fashion despite the mayhem created by the film review. It's not a movie to sit gawping at with popcorn. I was fascinated and laughing at the same time. I've never forgotten watching it.

Do characters have to be credible and does a dialogue have to be realistic for a movie to be 'good'? This movie certainly isn't everyone's cup of tea. The typical french virtues/vices of film making are present here: "over-intellectualizing, not tying up a storyline, and wasting time on details", yet, at the same time, the film satirizes exactly this French behaviour, and that what for me makes it very enjoyable, and proves its one step ahead of the current french film makers who all too often take themselves much too seriously without delivering anything intellectually original or emotionally engaging. In particular Sandrine kiberlaine's character is very entertaining.