Melodrama at its flattest
Written: Jul 14 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Some poignant and original ideas
Cons: Predictable plot and inane dialogue
The Bottom Line: Simple dialogue in a simple plot -- sure to end up on the syllabi of college-level French courses.
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| verbatima's Full Review: The Housekeeper |
A passable, fairly bland melodrama, “La Femme de Menage” is a good choice for anyone wanting to see something innocuously pleasant or to improve their comprehension of conversational French.
Jacques (Jean-Pierre Bacri), a lonely middle-aged recording studio technician, tormented over a recent break-up with his wife, hires Laura (Emilie Dequenne), a young woman with jiggly bosoms and beaming smiles, to clean his apartment once a week. Sometime after Laura turns Jacques’ thoroughly trashed home into a warm, pastel-colored nest, the two begin a clumsy, impossible affair. And just in case you suspect that there is a trip into the breathtaking depths of pastoral France somewhere down the plot line – you are right.
On the whole, the film is predictable and trite. These qualities are attributable, at least in part, to the stereotypes on which the plot is built. Jacques is a stereotypical old geezer, stodgy and conservative, who hates noise, listens to jazz and classical music, and (as if he wasn’t depressed enough already) reads Dostoevsky on his leisure. Laura is a stereotypical young girl, shallow and fickle, who likes thrillers, dancing, and loud rap music. The ancient idea that opposites attract is usually combined with an effort to find or build some common ground between them; but in this film, the main characters end up pretty much where they began – Jacques bookish and melancholy, Laura superficial and glowing. Apart from being doomed, their relationship is also inconsequential, to all the characters and to the viewer. This is merely a story of two people whose lives briefly intersect for a commonplace, low-key fling.
The film is sadly lacking in originality. The scene where the lovers are driving through the picturesque countryside, with Jacques at the wheel and effervescent Laura sticking her head and elbow out of the car, seems plucked out of “Lolita”. In fact, many subtleties hint at the director’s effort to make Laura “lolitesque” – her plumpish bare feet, her joyful naivete, her lying on her stomach at the beach and leafing through a big magazine filled with pictures. I would not automatically label these allusions as cliches, because the character of Lolita has become archetypical. But in the case of “La Femme de Menage”, the similarities are, if anything, comical. Nabokov’s Dolores Haze is a fourteen-year-old nymphet; Berri’s Laura is obviously in her early twenties, at least. Laura, granted, is very young and still endowed with a certain aura of poignant adolescence – but at the same time, she is inescapably a grown woman, and her infantile artlessness thus defies belief. The effect that makes “Lolita” the disturbing chef d’oeuvre that it is – the ambivalence that we are compelled to feel over an older man’s tormented obsession with a teenage girl and the morally objectionable nature of that obsession – simply cannot be achieved here. All we are left with is a dull middle-aged man bashfully lusting after a puerile young woman.
I did enjoy certain aspects of the movie, however. Claude Berri subtly and accurately conveyed the vaguely oppressive atmosphere of cramped Parisian apartments, crammed into majestic sprawling buildings, the lean corridors and the multitude of doors inside them as contrasted with vast grey squares and boulevards of the city. There were also some moving observations on the complex nature of loneliness, exemplified by Jacques’ desire of solitude on the one hand and his suffering while being alone on the other, his timid overtures towards women in cafes and, at the same time, his fear of closeness. Bacri’s gifted acting rescues the film by way of these minor details. It is for these reasons that I stop short of not recommending this movie.
On the whole, not entirely a wash, but very nearly so.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
verbatima
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Location: Jersey City, NJ
Reviews written: 74
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"[If] I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster." Isaac Asimov
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