Rien sur Robert

I agree with MeisterK this movie was really bad. I think they wanted to make a kind of trendy intellectual movie but they totally missed the point. I find the overall stuff ridiculous, the characters are not credible at all, dialogs are nonsense,... and Luchini is playing Luchini...

It's not a typical french movie as MeisterK said. This one is just bad.

I disagree with MeisterK's comment that this is a "plotless, pointless, depressing, just plainly bad" film. (In any case, depressing just doesn't fit with the rest of the epithets. It takes a *good*, dark film to affect today's jaded audience to/near the point of depression.)

This film is certainly not one made to please the masses, but genuine works of art are rarely created with that intention. This is a very rich and intelligent film. The writing is impeccable and the directing just as good.

Michel Piccoli gives a great performance, as do Luchini, Cervi and Kiberlain.

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.

Do characters have to be credible and does a dialogue have to be realistic for a movie to be 'good'? This movie certainly isn't everyone's cup of tea. The typical french virtues/vices of film making are present here: "over-intellectualizing, not tying up a storyline, and wasting time on details", yet, at the same time, the film satirizes exactly this French behaviour, and that what for me makes it very enjoyable, and proves its one step ahead of the current french film makers who all too often take themselves much too seriously without delivering anything intellectually original or emotionally engaging. In particular Sandrine kiberlaine's character is very entertaining.