De vrais mensonges
Beautiful Lies
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An anonymous love letter leads to a slew of misunderstandings in this French romantic-comedy starring Audrey Tautou (Amelie), from the director of Priceless. Emilie puts her heart into running her busy hairdressing salon in the sunny South of France. Meanwhile, her mum Maddy, has had her heart broken. When Emilie starts receiving anonymous love letters, she gets an idea: she decides to send them on to Maddy with the address changed, in an effort to put a skip back in her mother's step. The plan works and Maddy is touched by the confession. However when the author of the letter reveals himself, confusion, complications and dilemmas ensue as mother and daughter find themselves in a heated competition for the same man.
Watch the trailer here.
Synopsis : Un beau matin de printemps, Emilie reçoit une lettre d’amour, belle, inspirée mais anonyme. Elle la jette d’abord à la poubelle, avant d’y voir le moyen de sauver sa mère, isolée et triste depuis le départ de son mari. Sans trop réfléchir, elle la lui adresse aussitôt. Mais Émilie ne sait pas encore que c’est Jean, son employé timide, qui en est l’auteur. Elle n’imagine surtout pas que son geste les projettera dans une suite de quiproquos et de malentendus qui vont vite tous les dépasser…
Beautiful Lies - De vrais mensonges
Critique de Jordan Mintzer
Produced by Philippe Martin. Directed by Pierre Salvadori. Screenplay, Salvadori, Benoit Graffin.
With: Audrey Tautou, Nathalie Baye, Sami Bouajila, Stephanie Lagarde, Judith Chemla, Cecile Boland, Didier Brice, Daniel Duval.
When a mom and her daughter fall for the same guy, the result is plenty of ooh-la-las but few actual laughs in Gallic helmer Pierre Salvadori's tried-and-tested romantic comedy, "Beautiful Lies." Despite a cast toplined by Audrey Tautou (who, as if to incite further mispronunciation of her name, sports a large tattoo on her neck), this long-winded assembly of quid pro quos and borderline sexist banter goes only to the most predictable places. Salvadori ("Priceless") has fared much, much better with such farcical material in the past, and the pic may perform below expectations before rebounding on the French tube.
Provincial hairdresser Emilie (Tautou), not to be mistaken for Amelie, runs her beauty parlor with an iron fist, especially when it comes to dealing with hunky Arab handyman Jean (Sami Bouajila). When she finds out Jean is an overeducated translator who speaks at least five languages, this infuriates her to the point that she fires him. (Why she does this is never entirely clear, though she seems to have a major inferiority complex when it comes to intelligent men.)
Little does Emilie know (or perhaps she doesn't want to know) that Jean is madly in love with her. When he sends her an anonymous letter at the start of the film, she tosses it in the garbage, then decides to fish it out, copy it over and mail it to her depressed, recently dumped mom, Maddy (Nathalie Baye), a woman so starved for a man that she wanders the streets in a bathrobe looking for the letter's author.
Maddy eventually stumbles upon Jean, and the ensuing confusion, which lasts at least a full hour, leads to lots of deadweight jokes involving Mom's relentless sex drive. Soon enough, Emilie's own feelings for Jean awaken, and the two ladies, easily 30 years apart, are thrown into a veritable mommy-daughter showdown in which Emilie's "true lies" (as the original title explains) come back to haunt her.
Surely such a tale could take place only in France, and the morality of sleeping with your mom's boyfriend hardly comes into play here. Instead, Salvadori and regular co-scribe Benoit Graffin focus on the war between Emilie's suppressed libido and Maddy's oversized one, with the rather endearing Jean caught in between. In the end, he winds up being the pic's one redeemable character, which says a great deal about the filmmakers' view of their supposedly sweet-natured female protags.
Doing what they must with the script's vaudeville-style scenarios, Tautou and Baye can only go so far playing two women on estrogen overdrive. Bouajila ("Outside the Law") is more subdued, and Jean seems to watch the proceedings with a mix of horror and resignation. Supporting roles are often caricatures of small-town simplemindedness.
Standard tech package is highlighted by Emilie's garish and overlit hair salon.
Camera (color), Gilles Henry; editor, Isabelle Devinck; music, Philippe Eidel; production designer, Yves Fournier; costume designer, Virginie Montel; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS Digital), Michel Casang, Christophe Winding, Josefina Rodriguez, Joel Rangon; line producer, Marc Fontanel; assistant director, Alan Corno; casting, Alain Charbit. Reviewed at Pathe screening room, Paris, Dec. 1, 2010. Running time: 104 MIN.
Beautiful Lies
(M) Contains Offensive Language 105 mins - FRA - World cinema/Romantic comedy - No comps - French with English subtitles
An anonymous love letter leads to a slew of misunderstandings in this French romantic-comedy starring Audrey Tautou (Amelie), from the director of Priceless. Emilie puts her heart into running her busy hairdressing salon in the sunny South of France. Meanwhile, her mum Maddy, has had her heart broken. When Emilie starts receiving anonymous love letters, she gets an idea: she decides to send them on to Maddy with the address changed, in an effort to put a skip back in her mother's step. The plan works and Maddy is touched by the confession. However when the author of the letter reveals himself, confusion, complications and dilemmas ensue as mother and daughter find themselves in a heated competition for the same man.
Watch the trailer here. http://www.flicks.co.nz/trailer/beautiful-lies/3950/
Synopsis : Un beau matin
de printemps, Emilie reçoit une lettre d’amour, belle, inspirée mais anonyme.
Elle la jette d’abord à la poubelle, avant d’y voir le moyen de sauver sa mère,
isolée et triste depuis le départ de son mari. Sans trop réfléchir, elle la lui
adresse aussitôt. Mais Émilie ne sait pas encore que c’est Jean, son employé
timide, qui en est l’auteur. Elle n’imagine surtout pas que son geste les projettera
dans une suite de quiproquos et de malentendus qui vont vite tous les dépasser…
Beautiful Lies - De vrais mensonges
Critique de Jordan Mintzer
Produced by Philippe Martin. Directed by Pierre Salvadori. Screenplay, Salvadori, Benoit Graffin.
With: Audrey Tautou, Nathalie Baye, Sami Bouajila, Stephanie Lagarde, Judith Chemla, Cecile Boland, Didier Brice, Daniel Duval.
When a mom and her daughter fall for the same guy, the result is plenty of ooh-la-las but few actual laughs in Gallic helmer Pierre Salvadori's tried-and-tested romantic comedy, "Beautiful Lies." Despite a cast toplined by Audrey Tautou (who, as if to incite further mispronunciation of her name, sports a large tattoo on her neck), this long-winded assembly of quid pro quos and borderline sexist banter goes only to the most predictable places. Salvadori ("Priceless") has fared much, much better with such farcical material in the past, and the pic may perform below expectations before rebounding on the French tube.
Provincial hairdresser Emilie (Tautou), not to be mistaken for Amelie, runs her beauty parlor with an iron fist, especially when it comes to dealing with hunky Arab handyman Jean (Sami Bouajila). When she finds out Jean is an overeducated translator who speaks at least five languages, this infuriates her to the point that she fires him. (Why she does this is never entirely clear, though she seems to have a major inferiority complex when it comes to intelligent men.)
Little does Emilie know (or perhaps she doesn't want to know) that Jean is madly in love with her. When he sends her an anonymous letter at the start of the film, she tosses it in the garbage, then decides to fish it out, copy it over and mail it to her depressed, recently dumped mom, Maddy (Nathalie Baye), a woman so starved for a man that she wanders the streets in a bathrobe looking for the letter's author.
Maddy eventually stumbles upon Jean, and the ensuing confusion, which lasts at least a full hour, leads to lots of deadweight jokes involving Mom's relentless sex drive. Soon enough, Emilie's own feelings for Jean awaken, and the two ladies, easily 30 years apart, are thrown into a veritable mommy-daughter showdown in which Emilie's "true lies" (as the original title explains) come back to haunt her.
Surely such a tale could take place only in France, and the morality of sleeping with your mom's boyfriend hardly comes into play here. Instead, Salvadori and regular co-scribe Benoit Graffin focus on the war between Emilie's suppressed libido and Maddy's oversized one, with the rather endearing Jean caught in between. In the end, he winds up being the pic's one redeemable character, which says a great deal about the filmmakers' view of their supposedly sweet-natured female protags.
Doing what they must with the script's vaudeville-style scenarios, Tautou and Baye can only go so far playing two women on estrogen overdrive. Bouajila ("Outside the Law") is more subdued, and Jean seems to watch the proceedings with a mix of horror and resignation. Supporting roles are often caricatures of small-town simplemindedness.
Standard tech package is highlighted by Emilie's garish and overlit hair salon.
Camera (color), Gilles Henry; editor, Isabelle Devinck; music, Philippe Eidel; production designer, Yves Fournier; costume designer, Virginie Montel; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS Digital), Michel Casang, Christophe Winding, Josefina Rodriguez, Joel Rangon; line producer, Marc Fontanel; assistant director, Alan Corno; casting, Alain Charbit. Reviewed at Pathe screening room, Paris, Dec. 1, 2010. Running time: 104 MIN.