Così fan tutti

Comme une image (2004) was co-scripted and directed by Agnès Jaoui. (The film is known as Look at Me in the U.S. It's a reasonable title--just not the title the Director gave it.)

The plot concerns a group of educated and successful Parisians whose lives intersect in both Paris and Burgundy. The protagonist is Lolita Cassard, played by Marilou Berry. Lolita is a dedicated vocal student, whose most serious problem is that her father--played by Jean-Pierre Bacri--is too self-absorbed to pay much attention to her. Étienne Cassard is a noted author and publisher, who cares about his work, his position of power, and, to some extent, his beautiful trophy wife and their young daughter (Lolita's half-sister). Lolita's life is more trouble to him than he cares to accept, so he chooses to ignore her or belittle her.

Lolita is overweight, and acutely conscious of this because she is surrounded by elegant women of all ages who are slender. Lolita blames her problems on her weight and--reasonably enough--she can't bring herself to accept her father's lack of interest, let alone his lack of compassion.

Into this equation comes Sylvia Millet, Lolita's vocal coach. Incredibly, director/screenwriter Jaoui also stars in this pivotal role. (It's hard to believe that Jaoui can be both an outstanding director and an experienced star. It's even harder to believe that she can direct herself in such a nuanced and intelligent performance. She must be Wonder Woman!)

Sylvia has true compassion and affection for Lolita, but she's not a saint, and is not above using her influence with Lolita to advance her husband's writing career.

To my mind, Agnès Jaoui represents the perfect French film star. She looks talented, intelligent, and strong, and she's also very attractive in a non-conventional way.

One reviewer wrote, "Look at Me is about nothing and everything simultaneously." I disagree. It's not about everything, but it is about love, friendship, ambition, hurtfulness, and betrayal.

Classical music is played and sung throughout the film, and it's outstanding. Be prepared to hear songs and arias by Verdi, Offenbach, Monteverdi, and Mozart.

Jaoui (with her costar Bacri) won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes. With great acting, direction, music and script, this movie is not to be missed!

I like the movie and thought it was interesting to see so many characters develop. Few popular American films can pull that off. The title made more sense to me after I thought for a while.

EVERYBODY in the film was saying, "Look at me!" which I think was the title of Pierre's book that he got accepted in the movie.

Lolita, of course, is saying to her father, Etienne, "Look at me, your daughter," as well as to everyone else, "Look at me for more than the chubby adolescent. I'm more than the daughter of the famous guy you want to curry favor with."

Etienne is saying, "Look at me (and my beautiful wife young enough to be my daughter)" and always striving for recognition (well displayed at the party where he forces the mogul to come over to HIM).

Sylvia, the music teacher, is certainly saying to her husband, Pierre, "Look at me, instead of obsessing over your 3rd book! For crying out loud, the other books got published and were well-reviewed." She tentatively enjoys it when the party guy really DOES look at her and they dance.

Pierre says, "Look at me," in his burning quest for publication and chasing the association with Etienne.

Karine, Etienne's young wife, probably was saying, "Look at me," when she married the famous author but then doesn't get enough of his time/attention, particularly because he's always checking out the new potential trophies. Their daughter is certainly saying, "Look at me," with all her attention-getting tantrums.

Sebastien (Raschid) is saying "Look at me as a real person, more than the stereotyped Algerian/Moroccan/Turk, unable to fit smoothly into French society."

Agnes Jaoui's Look at Me is an almost perfectly-pitched comic character study, a nimble, amusing and thoughtful portrait of flawed people and their unlikely relationships. The principals form their attachments through a combination of accident and ambition: Lolita (Marilou Berry), the daughter of famous writer Etienne Cassard (Jean-Pierre Bacri), seeks the aid of an overworked music teacher, Sylvia (Agnes Jaoui), in rehearsing her chorale group for an up-coming performance. Sylvia has no interest in helping Lolita, whom she considers a bit of a pest, until realizing who Lolita's father is; wishing to meet the famous Cassard, who might be able to help her struggling-writer husband Pierre's (Laurent Grevill) career, Sylvia agrees to coach the ensemble. Cassard, taken with Sylvia and Pierre, helps the fledgling author; a rave article appears in a big newspaper, and Pierre is on his way to fame and fortune. Things come to a head, however, during one of those beloved French weekends in the country (where would French cinema be without weekends in the country): Cassard demonstrates himself to be a jerk by dressing-down his young, attractive wife Karine (Virginie Desarnauts) in front of everyone; Lolita realizes that her boyfriend Mathieu (Julien Baumgartner) is only interested in her because she's the daughter of the famous Cassard; Sylvia realizes what a jerk SHE is for trying to use poor Lolita, etc., The central character, Lolita, has the misfortune of being the off-spring of a famous man; she seems doomed always to exist in his shadow, to fail in every effort to gain attention for herself (to get someone to look at her). She's overweight, and chatters incessantly, and puts inordinate pressure on herself, but Agnes Jaoui has not conceived her as a poor, downtrodden victim; instead Jaoui has made her as self-absorbed as her father, as desperate for validation, creating a dynamic between them that feels wholly convincing, the friction that always exists between family members who are more alike than they would care to admit. The other important relationship is that of Sylvia to Pierre; Sylvia seems a woman of integrity, despite her rather shameless use of Lolita to gain entrée into Cassard's circle, but Pierre, after years of struggle, seems all-too-willing to toss his principles out the window in the name of success (he appears on a ridiculous talk-show, confetti raining on his head and half-naked girls grinding in his face; Sylvia can only sit on the sofa and stare in astonishment at what her husband has gotten himself into). Jaoui's intent is to delineate these characters precisely, to sketch as minutely as possible their motives, to map out their inter-relationships. And she achieves this, without apparent detriment to the narrative which moves briskly and confidently, and with the aid of several excellent performers. Marilou Berry is both sunny and gloomy as Lolita; she has her moments of self-doubt, almost of depression, but is too fundamentally driven, too stubborn, to allow her disappointments to stop her. Her father, Cassard, is played by Jean-Pierre Bacri as a man who has bought into his own hype so completely that he's forgotten he was ever anyone other than the eminent personage he's become (he's forgotten what it was like to be young and insecure like Lolita, and behaves thoughtlessly toward her). As Sylvia, Agnes Jaoui finds a sort of middle-ground between Lolita's self-doubt and Cassard's arrogance; and as her confused husband Pierre, Laurent Grevill projects the right kind of blandness alongside the dynamic Cassard, whom he idolizes but doesn't measure up to (Cassard may be a creep, but he wouldn't be caught dead on a dumb TV show). Jaoui orchestrates the comedy proficiently, eliciting performances that strike a nice balance between comic mannerism and naturalistic credibility (Bacri is especially strong, playing Cassard with an array of tellingly affected gestures while maintaining an undertone of quiet befuddlement). The one word that sums up the movie is "balance": balance between comic intention and essential believability, bitterness and reconciliation, ambition and empathy, intimacy and discretion.

The breath of fresh air - refined, funny, ironic, in the best traditions of Chekhov's plays, this movie is a triple triumph for its writer/director/star Agnes Jaoui. "Look at me" is the story of 20 years old Lolita (rarely a name mismatches a girl so much. Lolita is a pudgy young woman with a very low self-esteem even though she's got a beautiful voice and passion for singing) who desperately craves her father's attention. Ironically, her father, one of the most famous writers in France, known for his deep, observant and subtle novels is an arrogant, self-centered, and self-involved man who hardly acknowledges Lolita - just to criticize her. He never finds time to listen to the tape Lolita made especially for him in hope to get his interest and approval. The beauty of the script and the movie is that Agnes Jaoui does not use only black or white colors to paint her characters. They turn with their different facets to the viewers and the film itself is a precious gem. The acting is superb by everyone. As a bonus treat, we will hear some of the most beautiful music every written, including the pieces by Monteverdi and Handel.

9/10

The film begins with a character speaking on her cellphone but unable to be heard because the taxi driver is playing his radio at such a loud volume -- which is a fitting preface to the rest of the film, in which characters try desperately not only to be seen (as in the title, translated only approximately from the French "Comme Une Image"), but to be heard. At the heart of the story is a daughter's inability to be heard, quite literally, by her father -- who will rarely acknowledge his daughter and refuses to listen to his daughter's cassette of her singing classical music. Aside from the main father/daughter relationship, the film is full of types that are at once fresh and recognizable (the unctuous friend of the celebrity, the slightly defeated wife of an author, who has subsumed her own passions for music to his passion to be a famous author). This will come as no surprise to those familiar with Jaoui's other work. Though not groundbreaking cinema, Look At Me is two hours very well spent in a theater.