Sciampiste & Co.

This stars Nathalie Baye, not Audrey Tautou, of Amélie (2001) fame. (She has a supporting role.) Baye is Angèle, a 40-year-old Parisian beautician who has loved and lost a few too many times. Indeed, as the film opens we (and Samuel Le Bihan as Antoine) watch and hear her being dumped once again. Well, she is careless with men. She is perhaps too "easy." She picks up men, the wrong ones. She is aggressive in her desire. And now she has become cynical. All she wants now are one-nights stands, no more love, no more unbreak my heart. Love is too painful.

So when Antoine falls in love with her at something like first sight (I do have a weakness for love at first sight: it is so, so daring, and so, shall we say, unpredictable) she rejects him out of hand even though he is a vital and handsome artist, confident and winning. What IS her problem? But he pursues her even though he is engaged to another (Hélène Fillières). And when she gets drunk and wants some casual sex with him, he says no. He wants her fully in control of her faculties.

So this is a romantic comedy of sorts centered around a beauty parlor. However any resemblance to Hollywood movies in the same genre (Shampoo (1975) and Hairspray (1988) somehow come to mind) is purely coincidental. Here the salon is brightly and colorfully lit with a tinker bell as the door opens, and the clientele are eclectic to say the least: an exhibitionist who arrives in a raincoat and nothing else; a rich old man lusting after Tautou; a woman with oozing pimples on her...(never mind)...etc.

What makes this work so well is a completely winning performance by Baye, sharp direction by Toni Marshall, and a kind of quirky and blunt realism that eschews all cliché. Tautou fans will be disappointed in her modest part, but she is just adorable in that role. The voyeur scene in which she is willingly seduced by the rich old guy may raise your libido or your envy depending on where you're coming from. Ha!

See this for Nathalie Baye who gives the performance of a lifetime, simultaneously subtle and strong, vulnerable and willful. She makes us identify with her character and she makes us wish her love.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)

Netflix described this movie as follows: "With "Venus Beauty Institute," French writer and director Tonie Marshall takes us into this world of beauty and self image and into the lives of four strong, smart woman who make their living practicing beauty at a Parisian spa."

I was waiting throughout the entire movie for a glimpse of a strong woman...every woman in the entire movie seemed to me to be needy, insecure, wounded, angry, naive, or self destructive. The implausible plot of the very appealing Antoine, falling head over heels for Angele, I just didn't buy it. Not to mention, why did they have to make him already engaged to someone else? So throughout the whole thing, I'm feeling pissed off that he is betraying his fiance, while wooing this already completely screwed up woman, who has no faith in men already, but this guy is supposed to restore her faith in men, only he is destroying the life of another woman in order to restore the faith of this one????? The whole premise really upset me.

I just wish the movie had been described differently. As women with low self esteem and issues with men, dealing with their issues in their own uniquely unhealthy fashions.

This story revolves around the employees of a beauty shop in Paris. It's not quite an ensemble piece because there is a main character.

Nathalie Baye plays a 40-year-old woman, Angèle, who is going from one fling to another. Angèle doesn't believe in love anymore. She thinks it only brings pain and that love is a form of slavery. She's a very attractive woman but looks sad all the time and her friends notice.

Audrey Tautou plays Marie, another worker at the salon, and she's a plain country girl who starts having an affair with a much older man. Mathilde Seigner plays Samantha, who is tough on the outside and has lots of boyfriends, but is hurting inside (she tries to kill herself on Christmas Eve).

But Angèle is the focus of this film. We see her sitting with a man in a train station cafe at the beginning of the film, confident that he's enamored with her, but he brushes her aside, saying it was just an affair, and walks away. Then Madame Nadine, the beauty shop owner, tells her she needs to fix her appearance and apply more makeup, which only adds to her depression.

Along comes Antoine, a much younger man, who saw the spat at the train station and who follows Angèle back to where she works. He approaches her and professes his love for her, really his obsession for her. Angèle isn't interested in a relationship and Antoine isn't interested in casual sex, so things don't look good for the pair. But as the story progresses, she opens up to him and by the end they're both in love with each other.

I would have liked the film more than I did if the character of Antoine had been different. He's got a good physique and is much younger than Angèle, so I can see why she'd be attracted to him, and she's a good-looking woman, so I can see him being attracted to her, but as two people, I didn't really see the chemistry between them. Antoine seemed a bit too immature to make this romance seem true. But he is open and tender, and Angèle is vulnerable and needs some extra care, so maybe that's the key.

Anyway, the characters were all interesting and the acting well-done. There was a tender poignancy in the relationships between the people in the beauty shop and their customers, as well as some pretty funny scenes, and the film explores some adult themes about the nature of love and relationships, so I would definitely recommend this one even if it might have been better.

A parade of interesting characters walk through this beauty parlor usually convinced that all that matters is the external self. While the workers service their customer's outside's, the workers go about dealing with their inner feelings and emotions.

Which is more important? When the camera is in the "institute", things are pink and alive, but superficial. When the camera is outside, thing get much more dreary, but more emotionally satisfying.

May be both things count equally.

VENUS BEAUTY features France's fabulous Nathalie Baye, entering middle-age, as is her character (Angle) in this dramatic comedy. The Venus Beauty Salon is the location for this interesting personality study, not only of Ms. Bayes' character, but also of the personalities of her clients, admirers and co-workers. The film functions very well as a French modern slice-of-life study, across age, income, gender and social groups. Angle's pain in dealing with her sex and emotional life is very well depicted. Ms. Baye is aided by an excellent supporting cast including Samuel Le Bihan as her love interest. Le Bihan has been named France's "most promising young actor", and shows us why here. The movie really draws us into the lives of those who inhabit or pass through the Venus Beauty Institute, a microcosm of Parisian life in the 90's.