Rien à faire

What a superb, moving, powerful little romance drama, so convincing in the performances as well in the acting. This kind of film is not ordinarily my stuff, but there I was purely astonished. It sounds so real, so authentic, showing ordinary people for ordinary situations. You can'y feel ice cold in front such a story. Not bankable actors but so great. It is so bittersweet, without being gloomy either. French movie industry is very rich when it comes to provide such movies. And Marion Vernoux the female director is a true sensitive film maker whose features are really riveting, worth the watching.

"Rien à faire" is a watchable and enjoyable flick for one main reason. Marion Vernoux, the director had intuition by choosing Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi for the main role. It is a real joy to see fer acting on the screen and her big talent, her soft voice are widely sufficient to justify the vision of this film. It is all the more beneficial as she's ably assisted by her main partner Patrick Dell'Isola.

Marion Vernoux put very well in parallel her two main actors' living conditions. The contrast constitutes one of her best weapons between the naive and the simple-minded Marie and Pierre who appears as a lucid and clever man. This contrast is highlighted when the director evokes difference and misunderstanding about several points commented by the two characters. Another interesting detail: the supermarket plays the role of meeting between the two universes.

Then, the author built her movie around one of the biggest plagues at the end of the twentieth century: unemployment. So, you could expect to discover a bleak and hopeless atmosphere. It is not the case. The relative seriousness of the situation remains confined in the background. A certain joy of living comes out of the film. Marie and Pierre are jobless but while searching for a job, they take time to know themselves, to help each other and eventually to fall in love. Marion Vernoux lets us suggest the reasons why they become lovers. You feel that Marie gets on rather badly with her husband (Sergi Lopez). As for Pierre, he falls in love with Marie, mainly because he doesn't succeed in finding a job again.

However, this work isn't without a few faults. Certain sequences can be judged as conventional (like the one when Pierre explains to Marie why he wants to put an end to their love affair) and I think an extra touch of passion would have given the movie more strength.

Anyway, I repeat it: this movie is worth watching especially for Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and given the treatment Marion Vernoux made of her subject, her work can be taken for a cousin of the movie: "en avoir ou pas..." (1995) by Laetitia Masson.

The first part of the film is quite good. As soon as they stay in the supermarket, Marie-Do and Pierre are really moving. It gets worse later.

Not because of the actor's performances, they're all quite good. Just that the second part leads much more place to the kind of "silent conversations" you can have with someone you love, and that only you and her/him can understand. What happens here is that we understand, but we're getting a bit bored by their meaningful looks without a sound. On the whole, it isn't bad, just disappointing to see the second part far behind the first one.

The plot is not original in the least. It's the story of a lonely woman who lives a boring life and who meets a man who is bored too, they are both unemployed and it seems to be the only thing they have in common. They have an affair, and finally he leaves her. And that's all. I have seen this kind of stories too many times. And it lasts almost 2 hours...

Two people, unemployed, bore themselves to death, doing errands, visiting cafés, cleaning houses. One thing leads to another.

I read only two kinds of responses to this film: either you dislike it a lot, either you like it a lot. Either you find it clichéd and boring, either you find it sensitive and humanistic. I greatly enjoyed it so I am from the second group of viewers.

This is not a film about positive, successful, special skilled people. These are just ordinary people without a job. Like many people are. We follow them in their everyday struggle, and, eventually, their affair. But not the usual boring dramatic kind of struggle, with a lot of tears and crying, as you see often in cinema. It is a lighthearted and sensitive portrait.

What I really enjoyed was the sweetness of their spontaneous love affair. Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Patrick Dell'Isola are both exceptionally good in this film. Especially Bruni-Tedeschi. She has an incredible subtle change of her countenance every time. I rarely have seen someone playing uncertain as well as she does here. But Dell'Isola is also very convincing: cool and depressed at the same time. With actors of this range it is inevitable to end with a cute film about love and intimacy.

Yes, this is a love affair as we have already seen a thousand times, and yes, a couple of scenes are a bit predictable (especially the break-up halfway). But then cinema is not always story, is it? It is about images, and the exquisite sensuality of their meetings are, for me, way more interesting than the story. It's all about acting here. This kind of believable and charming characters are very rare in cinema. I can recall Ma nuit chez Maude, but not many other films. I rate it 8/10, mostly for sensitivity.