Paritai

The only excuse for such a movie is that it gives an authentic image of Paris 1926. But it doesn't. For one glaring example, one scene has Edith Piaf in the background singing Parlez moi d'amour. The only trouble is, in 1926, Piaf was 10 years old. Quelle domage.

A woman who is a tenured professor at Harvard invites an old boyfriend to her home. He brings along an ill-mannered (hence the title) girlfriend who, moreover, the woman's husband thinks stole $50 from his wallet. That's the setup, and from there it deteriorates. Why does the woman not ask her guests to leave? No reason is even suggested. If you can swallow that, perhaps you can enjoy the rest of the movie, though there isn't much to it except more bad manners and suspicions and accusations and, notwithstanding the blurbs on the videocassette box, precious little wit. Oh, yes, you get to hear the girl talk dirty.

There is also the putative pleasure of seeing that the rich (the Cambridge mansion where the movie takes place is worth a fortune in today's real estate market - right now you can take advantage of a pre-construction offer and purchase a studio apartment in Central Square for $360,000), and the highly respected, handle their personal affairs as poorly as the rest of us. If you changed the characters' professions, if the Harvard professor were a waitress, and her former boyfriend was in town not to deliver a musicology lecture but to compete in a bowling tournament, and if the setting were a 2-bedroom apartment in Queens, I strongly suspect the critics would pan the movie as just a lot of uninteresting and, yes, ill-mannered conversation where nothing happens.

But the professor is not a waitress, she is a tenured member of the Harvard faculty. No one, certainly no woman, achieves that distinction by being an ineffectual wimp. Yet no intelligent, forceful person would put up with this invasion of her home, and even attack on her marriage - she would ask her guests to leave (there's plenty of nice hotels in Cambridge).

I can guarantee that there will no spoilers in these comments, for there is no story to spoil. Superb special effects, very noisy soundtrack, excellent acting, a couple of cute lines and sight gags, no story at all. Normally, I would respond to so boring a movie by pressing stop and rewind after 20 minutes or so, but the visuals were so good I watched till the end. Then I was really sorry for wasting so much time. Where have all the writers gone?