Excellent, a Must See

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Having more or less proved himself as an actor Guillaume Canet tried his hand at Writing and Directing and the result is fairly respectable so that anyone seeing this in 2002 may well have predicted a solid future for Guillaume behind the camera and would have been proved right when Ne le dis a personne won him a Best Director Cesar (plus a Best Actor for Francois Cluzet) last year.It's never easy to blur genres - Billy Wilder did it brilliantly in The Apartment but how many Billy Wilders are there out there? That's right, you can count them on the fingers of one thumb - and segue from Satire to Manipulation to Violence but on the whole Canet manages to pull it off more or less successfully. He seems to have a knack for picking solid leading men (witness Cluzet in Ne le dis a personne) and in Francois Berleand he found the ideal actor to personify corruption. Berleand has a long history - some 166 titles - of supporting the finest French actors with a recent foray into leading man status and here he provides the industrial-strength cement that holds the film together. It's nearly always a bad idea for a director to cast his wife in a film at all let alone a leading role and when the wife in question (they divorced last year) is Diane Kruger it is more Disaster than bad idea but Canet himself plays perfectly against Berleand and if he just misses some of his targets they are not the Satirical ones of television Game Shows. On balance a fine effort.

I channel surfed into he opening credits of this show so came in with no pre-conceived ideas.Visually appealing, well directed and well acted the fundamental problem with this movie is that it has nothing to say.It presents itself as a film with something to say but in the end fails to deliver anything substantial, which is frustrating as if it was a bit wittier it could stand up as a fair comedy.As it is it thinks it's satire, but it's satire from a vacuous mind satirising something nobody cares about - the amorality of the rich entertainment elite.

On the set of a French TV show in the making we see the warm-up man energizing, as they do, the audience of a Jerry Springer-like production called `It's Tissue Time'. A fascinating intro, we are as enlivened as the TV audience as the story begins. The sad truth of the attractiveness of live television shows shines through as guests are humiliated through the words of others, a premise that is expanded on throughout the rest of the movie. What we gather in rapid fashion is that the assistant (Bastien, played by director Guillaume Canet) cheering on the audience is an ambitious sort that wants to develop his own show after the styling of his chosen mentor, `It's Tissue Times' producer (Broustal, as played by François Berléand) . There are complexities involving other characters right from the beginning, including the presence of Broustal's wife, the unhappy and reluctant companionship of Bastien's girlfriend Fabienne (Clotilde Courau) and the egotistically insufferable `It's Tissue Time' host Philippe Letzger (Philippe Lefebvre). A concept Bastien has developed for his own show is presented by Philippe and Bastien to the producer, and after being invited to a party at a disco Bastien is further asked to accompany Broustal and his much younger wife Clara (Diane Kruger, recently seen in `Troy') to their country home for the weekend. Bastien's ambition overwhelms any trepidation (he dismisses Fabienne's objections; this is his big chance!) he may have about the opportunity. The idiosyncrasies of the couple are unsettling to him and to us as well, portending a less productive and perhaps more involved weekend then Broustal has mentioned (working on the TV project). So things begin to happen even on the ride from the disco to the country estate of Broustal. The real reason for the invitation is slow in coming, but is no real surprise as events unfold. But the proceedings are as strange as the setting for them; why does Broustal have an enormous cage with vultures, how normal is it for that man's wife to be so interested in Bastien, and why is one surprise after another perhaps normal in the affairs of Broustal and Clara? What is great about this film and what sets it apart from mainstream movies is the relentless nature of Broustal. François Berléand gives a performance not unlike that of Ben Kingsley in "Sexy Beast" a few years back. Here is a character with enormous personal presence, generally unlikable but with reserves of condescension and cynicism the likes of which can only be transmitted through a strong performance. This is a good film with grit-your-teeth moments, comic touches and the general cachet of "Sexy Beast". The Seventies feel is perhaps due to the Continental locale and décor of a manor appointed to the taste of an avant-garde couple. But what plays out at the estate is at times violent, always sexually tense, never touching and at all times unpredictable. This film is not for one with mainstream tastes and children need not view it until well into their thirties. Even the ending is a surprise, and a pretty tidy tie-up at that. Rating: 3.5 Stars.

I haven't seen François Berléand anywhere else, but he is marvelous here. I was constantly watching out for him, guessing whether he was crazy, cunning or just blasé. The others are OK, but he simply eclipses them. The film has some nice turns, especially in the first half, where it successfully keeps up a relaxed yet intriguing atmosphere of a rich man's weekend where anything can happen (very 70s). Also, there are great homosexual innuendoes balancing between funny and uneasy, something quite hard to achieve, in my opinion.Unfortunately, the characters never develop after the first hour, and the ending is contrived. Still, its quiet humor, clever script and some great acting earned it my vote of 8.