Rien sur Robert

I don't even want to waste my time describing how bad this movies is. Avoid it at all cost, you'll thank me. But anyway, here goes:

A very good example of french movie crap. Plotless, pointless, depressing, just plainly bad. A waste of talent, time and money.

I just saw it again after many years and I must say that Rien sur Robert is very enjoyable film, very clever comedy about emotions and our expectations about habits and feelings.

Robert, before the story begins, has done something that he shouldn't (and MeisterK too!), and he continues making wrong choices, all the time, to the end of the film, and this is what makes the plot so different from the Hollywood-plots.

But the best part is dialog of the characters, who are so amazing types with their way of behave.

And the actors make excellent work.

The character of Didier, whose troubles all begin when he gives a bad review of a film he hasn't seen, was apparently based on a real-life critic who made a similarly lazy judgement about Emir Kusturica's "Undergound". From this starting point, Pascal Bonitzer gives us a humorous portrait of a superficial, middle-class writer who is about to reap the consequences of his intellectual and emotional dysfunctions.

Fabrice Luchini's deadpan, wide-eyed performance as the constantly non-plussed critic who lurches from one embarrassing predicament to another is perhaps the film's main delight. So much so, in fact, that it comes as a slight disappointment to discover the story developing into a conventional relationship dilemma: will Didier settle with his promiscuous fiancée Juliette (Sandrine Kiberlain) who takes a sadistic pleasure in humiliating him at every opportunity; or will he end up with the crazy, masochistic Aurélie (Valentina Cervi) who is Juliette's complete opposite?

While far from the best example of its type, this is a perfectly decent French relationship comedy, well acted and directed, darker and broader than Rohmer, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny (particularly in the scenes between Luchini and Kiberlain), and utterly inconsequential (well, the title does sort of warn us about that).

It has a great final line, by the way.

"Nothing about Robert" is the description of empty, mediocre, hateful and paranoid existences... If the leading characters declare once in a while their love, they really like to let suffer each other. Is it a comedy or a drama? Is there even a plot? I had the pleasure of watching this unclassifiable movie because the characters in their vileness and outrageousness make one laugh. I loved their complexity which makes them at the same time close and odious. Especially, I discovered Valentina Cervi, actress with a very disconcerting performance, which interprets an exoplanet in the intellectual Parisian microcosm. Luchini is faithful to himself i.e. one always wonders from when he does a little too much. Sandrine Kiberlain is perfect in all the details.

Initially, I stopped watching a copy of this film because I found myself feeling disgusted with the protagonists. Later, I decided to watch the film again as an impartial observer. To me, it became an interesting black comedy of frailties and morals.

This is a story of middle-class immorality and a pathetic obsession reminiscent of Maugham's Of Human Bondage. Morally-weak Didier (Fabrice Luchini) tries vainly to break his ties with brazen/ promiscuous Juliette (Sandrine Kiberlain). She has no need to be reasonable/considerate as long as she has the upper hand. Didier vacillates in a promising affair with insatiable Aurélie (Valentine Cervi) which would free him from Juliette. Others involved with Didier and Juliette are womanizer Jérome (Laurent Lucas) and his fiancée Violaine (Nathalie Beautefeu). Unfortunately talented Michel Piccoli is wasted in his role as Ariel, Lucien's smug/outspoken critic.

As in this film, Luchini seems to specialize in far less than ideal `heros'. In the '96 Beaumarchais the Scoundrel, Luchini was a brilliant-but-roguish delight and Kiberlain played his confidante/ mistress-and-later-wife. In '90 La Discrete, he played an egotistical womanizer who gets his come-uppance.