O Enigma Chinês

Your partner leaves you after she found new love in a far away land. You want to be close to your children so you relocate and become prepared to take any crappy job and live in any type of shithole in order to get by. Sounds complicated?

In case the above is not an intricate enough, you become a sperm donor to help a same sex couple have a child.

In the midst of all this, an old flame comes into town but how can you think about romance? Then again why not? After all, our character does not lead a complicated life, he just...lives.

Incredibly witty with a mixture of European/American sense of humour, it provides a refreshing angle to life itself and how it keeps going with its ups and downs.

Going to new places, especially when you are a bit older and are more likely to have settled down elsewhere, is difficult. About those difficulties, finding oneself and others (and love and work and ...) ... this is what this movie is about. It's mature in its thinking and might not be the entertainment some seek. But for what it is (and for the actors it has in it), it's really good.

It's not that much happens, but that is life (mostly, unless you are a special agent or whatnot). There is also nudity and god forbid intercourse. But there is also comedy and "betrayal" and situations you might encounter in life. And decisions ... decisions and more decisions! What is there in the end?

I haven't seen the two previous movies by the same director and actors preceding this one, but all by itself I loved this one. It is funny, witty, interesting and unusual. I understand the previous two movies portrayed the lives of characters at an earlier age. Now they are around 40 years of age, they are in NYC and they have different set of problems. I participated in a Q&A with the director at the end of the movie and I understand what he is trying to portray is a generation of people who are more mobile, who aren't afraid of mixing with different cultures, live in different countries, deal with the challenges presented by this new country. Movie has a very very positive, upbeat look at things. And it is very refreshing to have this positive outlook considering how many movies feeds of drama and difficulties almost to a degree, which makes them unrealistic. Life is not so bad and things don't go that bad in real life. You might get lucky at things. This movie has a positive, realistic look at life. I could easily relate to it. Loved it, highly recommend it. Especially if you want to laugh a bit and feel good about life. And there is nothing wrong with that.

CASSE-TETE CHINOIS (Chinese Puzzle, 2013) is the third film in Cédrich Klapisch's series on globalization and growing older. It began with L'Auberge espagnole, which saw Xavier Rousseau (Romain Duris), a 25 year-old university student and aspiring writer, spending a wild year in Barcelona with other exchange students from throughout Europe. The second film Les poupées russes revisited Xavier as he turns 30 and has still not established a writing career or found a stable relationship. Its happy ending with Xavier settling down with former Erasmus companion Wendy (Kelly Reilly) seemed to augur well for the future.

But as Casse-Tete Chinois opens, we find that Xavier's relationship with Wendy collapsed ten years into their marriage. Wendy has left Paris for New York, where she has met another man, and takes their two children with her. Xavier follows them to New York to be closer to his children, but Wendy has turned cold and hostile. His lesbian pal Isabelle (Cécile de France) is also there, and Xavier has helped her and her lover have a child. On the threshold of 40, Xavier finds that his life is just as complicated as ever. The film follows Xavier adjusting to a new life in the United States, searching for a flat and a job, and dealing with a bitter custody battle. With all this on his plate, his old ex Martine (Andrey Tatou), now a import-export businesswoman dealing with organic products, drops in with her two children too.

In commenting on this series of films, Cédric Klapisch has said that he wants to capture the fact that Xavier's and younger generations are very mobile, and for them it's commonplace to go to another country to work/study or enter into a relationship with someone of a different nationality. Here this mobility is explored through several French people in New York, and New York with its wealth and myriad immigrant communities is treated as a very distinct place from the United States in general. Nothing at all is seen or heard of the Spanish flatmates from the first film, who at least got a bit part in the second film. I think that's rather a shame, we could have at least got a few lines of dialogue about how William (Kevin Bishop), whose marriage to a Russian woman was the whole setup for the second film, is getting on.

I enjoyed revisiting some of these characters again after nearly a decade, and Duris's acting is admirable: his Xavier remains the manchild we know and love, but he captures the impact of the years. Cécile de France is again so convincing in her role that one wonders if she really is like this in real life. The script, however, strikes me as rather weak. There's a strange side plot of adultery, where a character appallingly cheats on their lover and the other characters hardly object, and it ends up with almost the exact same scene of everyone racing to an apartment to warn the trysting pair as in the first film.

Still, the series as a whole remains worth seeing and an important commentary on the contemporary world. I hope Klapisch will continue Xavier's story in a few more years.

It's great even if you haven't seen the 2 first movies! But if you have, know that it brings you the same kind of lightness and fun. Makes you want to enjoy life to the fullest! Each character is perfectly built up, and you get attached to all of them (I feel like I know them personally and would happily move in with them!)

Of course, this movie builds up on the story that started 20 years earlier, so it's great to see how each of these people evolved, how life changes, and how it's still linked to the past. It's hard not to fall in love with these people! Each of the 3 movies happens in a totally different place. So let yourself be carried away!