Pas sur la bouche

In my opinion, I didn't know that this was a musical comedy. The French make the best films around with character driven story lines. This film has a first rate cast but I didn't care for Lambert Wilson's performance as the American, Eric Thomson. I did love Isabelle Nanty as Arlette, the old maid. She was perfect and memorable. Arlette's sister, Gilberte, has a problem. She has three men in her life including her unsuspecting second husband who thinks he's her first, her first American husband, Eric Thomson, who comes to Paris on business, and a young male artist/teacher Charly who prefers older women. The film is first rate in art direction, costumes, music, casting, and writing. I felt Lambert Wilson was out of place and out of tune as the American. But still, this film has memorable characters and can cheer you right up.

What was this? Why was I here?

The trailer was sophisticatedly blasé – suggesting that Alain Resnais had cast Audrey (Amélie) Tautou to target the American market, and that lantern-jawed Jalil Lespert would add to the film's swoon factor. So, expecting a saccharin romcom I had failed to do my homework on Google and I woke up three minutes into the film to a startling revelation.

'It's an operetta! No one told me!'

In our thrillseeking contemporary culture accelerated by Karen O's screams and the mentholated bandwidth of broadband wifi, people could question the 2-hour time investment required to watch a bigscreen adaptation of an obscure French-language three-act operetta which was first performed in 1925. Especially one which glorifies the frivolity of the Parisian jetset via music and rhyme, replaces location shots with deliberately stagey sets, and conceals a skeletal plot under the billowing skirts of witty ditties and fully-orchestrated vignettes.

The core tune, 'Pas Sur La Bouche', is typical of the film as a whole. It recounts how Eric Thomson (Lambert Wilson), a 'pudibond' (prudish) American businessmen, is too pent up to kiss girls on the lips. Four nubile sirens entreaty the fleeing entrepreneur for a covert snog, and through basic studio boomwork we are subjected to half-length shots of turgid choreography as the frigid, bespectacled yank retreats up the successive tiers of a grandstand. Does Mr Thomson suddenly succumb to the onslaught, staging an impromptu gangbang with the four nymphettes and confessing his concupiscence to a nearby priest? Of course not. It's 1925. Eric Thomson has never heard of Viagra. This is an operetta.

Which is fine if you're about 115 years old and you're into the genre. 'Pas Sur La Bouche' certainly seemed like a jolly, nostalgic outing for its dapper actors – especially the slinky, hammy Sabine Azéma and the neurotic, unkempt Isabelle Nanty. Wouldn't we all leap at the chance to get dolled up in chintzy art deco garb and to dish up outmoded verbal conceits - in song - to the cinemagoing masses?

The plot is the kind of open-door/close-door farce that works well in theatre. Wealthy Socialite Gilberte (Azéma) hides her former marriage from Magnate husband Valandray (Pierre Arditi). Socialite flirts with Beau (Jalil Lespert), a struggling artist. Beau is courted by Belle (Audrey Tautou) yet he prefers Socialite. Belle confides in Socialite's Spinster sister (Isabelle Nanty), who assumes the role of matchmaker. Socialite's American ex-husband (Lambert Wilson) returns to buy Magnate's business. High jinks ensue. After much silliness all ends well.

So far, so Molière. The songs (by librettist André Bardé and Maurice Yvain, the Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber of their day) are jaunty and innocuous. They offer plenty of scope for the sort of theatrical winks and to-camera headtwists occasionally glimpsed in Abba videos. The standout tracklist below - with rhyming summaries to replace what can only be approximate subtitles - is an appeal to a less faithful rendering of the vaudeville format in future.

"Choeur d'entrée"

-Rich girls detail their passions for retail, fashions

-Subplot rake is overt about his chasing of skirt

-Magnate lets rip with his pet discourse: that devil, divorce.

"Comme j'aimerais mon mari"

-Socialite lauds the botox invigoration of toyboy flirtation

-Reveals her projection of six-packed ab onto spouse's flab

"Gilberte et Valandray"

-Socialite and Magnate engage in kitchen cajoling during lobster-boiling

-A warbled feuilleton about riches, kisses, dresses, bouillon

"Quand On N'a Pas Ce Que L'on Aime"

-Wallflowers debunk the inconstancy of hunks

-Hearts flutter, lips quiver, Spinster splutters, Belle shivers

"Pas Sur La Bouche"

-Stiff, suited yank avoids lolita hanky-pank

"Sur Le Quai Malaquais"

-Beau and Belle muse their future caress at a Seine-side address

-Dénouement will follow, with entire cast in tow

And that's about it. Burst into tears, not song. If you want a timewarp back to lavish musicals about Paris, dust off some old videos of Funny Face or Gigi and tap the heels of your black-and-white correspondent's shoes to Maurice Chevalier's 'Sank 'eavens for lee-toll gulls'. Or at least rent Moulin Rouge. It seems that the octogenarian Alain Resnais took heart from the box office success of 'Huit Femmes', François Ozon's singing, dancing allstar vehicle aimed purely at humiliating France's bouffoned-and-tucked grandes actrices. And what with the cinematic euros pouring into musicals of late - Topsy Turvy, Moulin Rouge, Chicago – surely this operetta would provide succour to French audiences sickened by the rewind rape scenes of 'Irreversible' or the porno violence of 'Baise-Moi'? With that bobbed actress out of Amélie, it might even have turned a profit.

Like several other reviewers I was taken to the film 'cold' without knowing anything about it, and after several minutes was expecting the somewhat lacklustre tunes and stock-farce characters to tip over into something edgy and contemporary. Mais non. However is this such a bad thing? Given the French predilection for unflinching realism and tragic endings, Pas Sur La Bouche can be enjoyed as a salute to the traditions of the Comedy Francaise, an expression of nationalist (anti-Brussels?) sentiment, and as a crafted product as lovingly detailed as a reproduction Deco sideboard. One is almost expected to read afterwards that Resnais had an ironic or iconoclastic subtext in mind, but the film seems to be charmingly irony-free throughout. There are no patronising modernist jabs at the shallowness of pre-war bourgeois entertainment, and in fact the period is recreated with a warm and sentimental glow. It can be argued in fact that the play has been not so much adapted for the screen as embalmed, for there are definite longueurs, the singing voices are almost uniformly mediocre, and the lack of varied or outdoor settings does detract. All in all, a charming, civilised and unexpected entertainment from one of the self-styled intellectuals of French cinema, and a brilliant recreation of an ensemble of now-forgotten French 'types'. To get an idea of precisely how far comedy has 'advanced' in 70 years, compare with Legally Blonde or My Best Friend's Wedding and you'll see my point.

Alain Resnais, darling of the avant garde, continues his journey back to the mainstream and, let's face it, BEYOND the mainstream, with this lush photography of even lusher decors and costumes by Vanity Fair out of Vogue. Nothing wrong with that, of course, if you can get past the hypocrisy. Here we have, set in the twenties, that old standby the second husband who has to cut a deal with his wife's ex, a sister-in-law and two ingenues thrown in for good measure with everyone breaking into song at the drop of a lorgnette. Pierre Arditi does suave as if he invented it and whether by design or accident contrives to sound like Charles Boyer on medication;Mrs. Resnais, Sabine Azema does style as effortlessly as Astaire and Audrey Tatou has cornered the current market in gorgeous. This should be enough to either encourage or deter you. 6/10

If I hadn't read his name on the DVD cover, I never would have suspected that this rather gushy and old fashioned musical was made by a man so closely associated with the French New Wave. In fact, the film is so far from that, that I wonder if back in the 50s and 60s, New Wave auteurs would have absolutely hated this type of film--it's so...so...unreal. And, it seems to have little to do with so many of his previous films. This isn't necessarily a bad thing--just a very surprising thing.

What I also found a bit surprising was the amount of praise some of the reviewers gave this film--especially when there are so many better French musicals out there. The songs in this film were simply not particularly interesting and the characters all seemed so bland and stereotypical. If I had to see another rich person who fretted about how hard it is to be rich or get a good sale price on a designer outfit, I was going to puke.

The bottom line is that like American musicals, not every French musical is gold. This film is not another "Les parapluies de Cherbourg" (UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG or "Huit Femmes" (EIGHT WOMEN) and despite the presence of Audrey Tautou, I can't see much reason to recommend it as anything other than a dull oddity.