La star aux deux visages

Kim Jameson (Andrea Roth) is a busy Fine Arts graduate student while her twin Kate (Andrea Roth) is a model known as Dominique. Kim meets up with Kate after a 4 years absence. She finds Kate a troubled flamboyant drunk. Then Kate has an idea to take a break in rehab while Kim takes her place in the modeling world. Henri Chambertin (Ian Richardson) is her boss at House of Shambertin and Philip Claremont (Rick Springfield) is the American who recently bought a controlling interest. Philip would love to fire Kate. Marie (Stephanie Beacham) is the only one at the company that Kim can reveal the switch to. Then Kate's boyfriend Jacques shows up like he is expected by her. It turns out that Kate isn't completely truthful and Kim starts falling for Philip.

The look is pretty cheesy and cheap. It's a low grade Harlequin Canadian TV movie. The production is generally weak. The only saving grace is Andrea Roth. She is able to play both twins well but that's all there is here. Rick Springfield does a reasonable job. The plot is twin switching with some questionable modeling world hijinx. Most of the locations are obviously not Paris. This is better than most of those types of TV movies but still not good.

A Change of Place is a lovely escape. OK, any chance to look at Rick Springfield is a lovely escape, but this film is really not bad. The shots of Paris don't hurt either. You get enough of Paris to make you long for a week or two there, but it isn't gratuitous. Restraint is the beauty of this film. It certainly could have fallen into the traps that so many of these made-for-TV chick flicks do. But the script and the direction manage artfully to avoid those pit-falls. The plot is more believable than in many made-for-TV films. It doesn't indulge in melodrama. Rick Springfield is a good actor even when he has a bad script, but in this case the dialogue is natural and one cannot help but like Philip, even when he is being curt to the heroine. The characters are not caricatures. Andrea Roth does a nice job playing identical twins without exaggerating the personality differences. Geordie Johnson is really amazing in his portrayal of the menacing Jacques. It had to difficult not to overplay this villain, but Johnson makes Jacques believably threatening without turning him into a preposterous Judith Krantz bad guy. This film is not an iconic dramatic masterpiece, and that is OK because it wasn't meant to be. It is a lovely way to spend a couple of hours. I highly recommend it.

Harlequin romance novels should not be made into movies. Ever. The plot was thin, ridiculous, and frankly, quite unbelieveable. The dialogue was trite.

Andrea Roth did well as Kim and Dominique, and Geordie Johnson was an amusing (and somewhat silly) villain Jacques Arnaud. Worth watching only if you really need a laugh.

Watch this movie only if you have absolutely nothing else to do and need a laugh. It's a typical harlequin movie,the plot is thin, the story's utterly romantic and ridiculous, and the actors don't have much to do but look beautiful, handsome and glamorous. Andrea Roth is playing twin sisters Kim and Dominique. Dominique is an immensely successful model but has taken to the bottle. Her sister, Kim, is an arts professor and aiming for her Ph.D in the same field. They change places when Kim decides to put Dominique into rehab and take her place as a model for a couple of weeks. There, she meets her dream man, helps Dominique overcome an embarrassing secret and ultimately all ends well. Typical movie...not too bad for people with nothing to do.

I got this on Netflix because I wanted to see Stephanie Beacham. While she's fine (in a part that felt about 50 years out of date even in 1994 - a French seamstress/talk-to who helps the heroine magically blossom), the overall production, and particularly Andrea Roth, won me over.

On paper, Kim is quite the Mary Sue - not only is she an excellent art student, a supportive sister, and a neophyte who becomes a supermodel via one montage, she also brings blackmailers and criminals to justice singlehandedly, and at one point even helps a woman deliver a baby! Yet Roth manages to make all of this believable, as well as managing to make you believe Kim and her twin sister Karen are different people.

I'm not really a huge Rick Springfield fan as other commenters are, but he and Roth have good chemistry and work well together. They do take some odd camera angles to avoid any actual nudity in their sex scene, but for people who want to see some flesh, the version I watched (presumably the international version) has topless extras.

While it's unfortunate that a talented director like Donna Deitch had to resort to helming material that with a few changes would have likely come out of Warner Brothers circa 1943, she really brings out the best in everyone involved.

Give it a try. You won't be disappointed.