I bow to no-one in my love for all things French and quirky, particularly Audrey Tatou, but can I be the first to call time on the Romain Duris-Tatou love-in? After Pot Luck, Russian Dolls and Chinese Puzzle comes yet another romantic drama set in Paris, which looks gorgeous, is fun, flirty and flighty and yet, five minutes after leaving the cinema, leaves not a single trace. Charm will get you a long way in movies, and Tatou and Duris have it in spades, but eventually it wears thin without a decent script or meaty idea behind it.
The blame has to lie with Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine), who has the word surreal’ nailed behind him as a default setting for every film writer in the world. Yes, his films all look lovely, and this one is especially sumptuous, with ravishing shots of an Amelie-style Paris and his good-looking leads to point his camera at. But here’s the problem, we now take that for granted. What’s needed is more wit, grit and a decent story. Gondry seems to have been locked into a room full of DVDs of Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, with MicMacs and Amelie stuck on repeat, with even a bit of Ratatouille thrown in there’s an annoying mouse character and an obsession with ravishing food and wine.
Doorbells turn into beetles as they ring a touch of Frank Kafka here food wriggles on its plate, eels come out of the tap, and Duris and his chef/best pal Sy live in what appears to be a railway carriage suspended above Paris. Duris has even invented a piano that mixes cocktails depending on what chords the player presses.
Duris is a young inventor with plenty of cash who’s living a great life in a semi-fictional Paris, with Sy providing him with a seemingly never-ending display of outrageous dishes and accompanying drinks. His clothes seem to choose themselves, even his shoes move around so he can slip into them easily. There is only one problem. His pal Elmaleh has snapped up Sy’s niece as his girlfriend, and poor old Duris is single. They all go to a party where he meets Tatou, and they begin to date. Their first encounter is a day in a flying cloud oh, very Gondry which hovers above the city, a Paris which still has the building site which is currently Les Halles, weirdly.
They go ice skating, get serious and eventually marry, and reality suddenly steps in. Elmaleh has spent all of his money and most of Duris’ on buying second-hand books by his favourite author, and then tragedy strikes. A single snowflake enters her lung on honeymoon, and her coughing gets worse until eventually an x-Ray finds the problem she has a flower growing in her lung. The treatment seems to work, but it is expensive.
The flower’ is clearly a metaphor for cancer or serious illness, but there are two problems here. Firstly we don’t know enough about the central couple to really care about them yes, they’re good-looking and they both like ice-skating, but that’s about it. Secondly the visual trickery, with amazing animation, dazzling shots and colour-co-ordinations, sits uneasily with the serious mood change the film attempts. When Tatou gets seriously ill, suddenly we get a screen full of ice blues, replacing the warm yellows and browns of the previous 90 minutes it seems a little clumsy at best, distasteful at worst. Alice In Wonderland-style rodents scurrying around and a deep look at cancer are uneasy bedfellows.
Overall verdict: Paper-thin, self-consciously quirky’ romantic drama which wears its charm like a badge of honour. Whether you go with it or not depends entirely on mood, but it is certainly a test of patience.
Reviewer: Mike Martin