Look At Me film review

certificate_12A

LOOK AT ME (COMME UN IMAGE)

The French husband and wife team of Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language film with The Taste of Others in 2000, which they co-wrote and Jaoui directed. Now they return with a film that deserves to go one better: a wonderfully funny comedy which satirizes modern society's outlook on fame. If Denys Arcand's Barbarian Invasions was chosen to win this year, this superior effort - which marks Jaoui out as a French Woody Allen, as well as an heiress to the works of her countryman Eric Rohmer - should be a major contender at next year's ceremony.

The film centres on Lolita (Marilou Berry), a 20-year-old who seems perpetually angry. She suffers with her weight and with her father Etienne, an irascible, mean, self-centred but hugely successful writer, played with consummate vigour by the wonderful Bacri. Etienne surrounds himself with fawning acolytes and a new trophy wife who is barely older than his own child. Nevertheless, Lolita is bound to him, in a financial sense and also because the only reason people seem interested in her is to be able to get closer to his successful aura.

Despite having a so-so singing voice, Lolita is determined to shine, and enrols in classes led by music teacher Syliva (Jaoui). Sylvia has a long-suffering and penniless writer husband Pierre (Laurent Grevil) at home, and regards her lessons with Lolita as a form of torture. All of this changes of course when she discovers her pupil's father is one of the country's most famous writers. Suddenly Sylvia changes her tune, desperate to impress Lolita and to persuade her to take a copy of Pierre's latest book for her father's perusal. This Lolita does, and soon enough Pierre and Sylvia become part of Etienne's adoring group.

If this sounds complex, then rest assured that both the writing and direction keep everything lucid and hugely amusing throughout. This is a film about fame and morality, and what we will do to achieve it, as well as how people's characters change once they encounter it. There are numerous amusing side plots, notably involving men that Lolita desperately tries to impress, as well as the manner in which Etienne treats his long-suffering assistant Vincent (Gregoire Oestermann) whom he at one point orders to make a four-hour round trip to collect a bottle of wine he has left in the fridge.