Linda Demais para Você

I have just finished watching this film, and it is probably too soon to write a review. However, the music is swirling through my head, and the beautiful photography and scenes are fresh in my mind. The glossy elegant wife and the warm but ordinary woman who is the temp at the husband's car retail outlet are both extraordinary women. The wife for her killer intelligence and frankness (now that's a wedding speech that is unusual)and the outrageously warm,sexy woman who falls for and, I suppose, seduces her husband. Yes, it does jump about a bit, and one is never sure with the conversations if that is normal behaviour (in which case, they all have issues). Gerard Depardieu could melt the paint off the walls with his eyes, and his acting has depth indeed. A thought-provoking film, and an absorbing one. Recommended if you like more than a chick flick.

Bertrand Blier's story of love at first sight between a successful auto salesman and his older, unglamorous secretary does more than simply dispel the skin-deep myth of physical beauty. Gérard Depardieu describes his new lover as "not beautiful, but nice", but his aristocratic young wife dismisses her for being 'common', setting up a conflict not between age and beauty but between opposing social classes, with a proletarian lug who married into the upper crust becoming justifiably mushy over someone less pretentious than his wife. It sounds like fun, but anyone expecting a lightweight romantic farce will be disappointed to find something closer to an intellectual exercise in style, designed around an exaggerated sense of melodrama and several odd, operatic gestures: characters thinking out loud in public or engaging in third-person soliloquies, and so forth. Not to mention, in an obscure ongoing joke, a few outspoken criticisms of the music of Franz Schubert.

Bertrand Blier is the French Pedro Almodovar: cynical and shocking. Either you love, either you hate his movies. Some of them have divided French public due to their shocking contents, notably "Les Valseuses" (1974). "Trop belle pour toi" appears like an exception in his work. It means that taste of Blier for provocation is less pronounced. However, it doesn't make the movie better for all that. It doesn't work for several reasons:

first, it's hard to follow the plot because Blier introduces sequences that are earlier or subsequent to the present scene. For example, we realize too late that Colette ( Balasko) after she left Bernard, married with a man and she had children. The movie ignores certain sequences that are however essential to the development of the plot.

Then, the movie irritates due to its main characters, it goes without saying that dialogs are the key to the good development of the plot. But here, you are under the impression that the characters don't exchange their words. They're talking in the emptiness and don't seem to care about the others' opinion!

Let's add that the movie, sometimes, creates a certain boredom because of some lifeless sequences that drag on (notably during dinners in Depardieu's ravishing house with his wife ( Bouquet) and all their guests.

In short, "trop belle pour toi" is a cold and no soul movie and it left me unsatisfied in spite of good ideas in the making ( Cluzet who expresses his anger with Schubert's music in the background played very loud). Even a trio of outstanding actors don't succeed in saving the movie.

Remark: Carole Bouquet won an Oscar in France in 1990, for her performance in this movie. Good for her.

"To Beautiful For You" tells of a French car dealer (Depardieu) who is married to a beautiful women (Boquet) but falls in lust with his less than beautiful temp (Balasko). What follows is an affair and much discourse about same between husband and wife, wife and temp, temp and husband, and all permutations thereof as they ponder the meaning of love. The film is not for want of a good cast or production talent and earned respectable marks from critics and public alike. However, is suffers from obvious histrionics and didactics and an off-puting uneven flow which make for a less than immersing experience. TBFY has little nudity or sex but some very explicit language. Only for those into esoteric French films. (B)

The few reviews here indicate that this is a film which provokes in some boredom and confusion, while other will find it provocative and daring in its originality. Maltin gives it a two-star rating and says "after a bright beginning, it goes absolutely nowhere." I was prepared to abandon the film after 15 minutes or so, but the absolutely gorgeous Schubert melodies that pervade the score and tie it all together....they kept me going with the film, and the fantastic photography, acting, and plot twists sustained my interest to the end.

Yes, the approach is surreal and the story-telling non-linear. Much of the dialog is brilliant, but it soon became obvious (to me, anyway) that these people are not actually saying these things to one another ... and what an interesting world it would be if we could say aloud all the things that we deeply feel! I cannot pretend to have understood it all, but the film had an intellectual appeal and, to repeat an earlier point, a ravishing score of Schubert pieces which adorn the film like precious jewels.