Le Prénom - 2012

Or “what’s in a name?” in English; It was a nice movie, it started very lightly, then it progressed into the various characters revealing secrets that threaten the family peace in an escalation of drama, and then at the very end, it all comes light again.  
I usually like this kind of movie, all set in one place, all based on the dialogue and just a few characters, and I did like this movie, but also feel that there was something wrong, something unfinished, like they spent so many words on some things in the first part of the movie that they don’t have enough for the second part.. but I can’t really make myself clear here. 
I’ll try to explain in detail. 
There are only a few characters in this movie: 
Élisabeth ( Valérie Benguigui) and her husband Pierre (Charles Berling), with their friend Claude (Guillaume de Tonquédec), Élisabeth’s brother Vincent (Patrick Bruel) and his wife Anna (Judith El Zein). A little description: Élisabeth (called Babou) teaches children at a local school, takes care of their daughter and son and takes care of the house; Pierre teaches at the university La Sorbonne and puts a great importance on words; Claude is a musician, plays the trombone with an orchestra and has always been Babou’s best friend. Vincent is the funny guy, the successful real estate agent who thinks he’s so funny and so irresistible, and his wife Anna who is now five months pregnant.
The plot: Babou invited Claude, Vincent and Anna over for dinner. Anna is late, as it often happens, because she had an important business meeting. She just discovered that she’s going to have a baby boy, so while they wait for her they start talking about the name they have chosen for him. Truth is, they chose the name Henri like his father, but Vincent knows that they’ll think it an ordinary, boring name, so he chooses to have a bit of fun and declares that the baby will be called Adolphe. They are all shocked, and point out how similar it sounds to Adolf, Hitler’s name, and Pierre launches in a long speech trying to make him understand how stupid it would be such a thing. This goes on for a while, Pierre won’t let it go, Vincent won’t change his mind, in fact he says that if he changes it he’ll call him Adolf! Even Babou thinks it a bad idea, when she’s informed, since as always they keep on talking while she’s in the kitchen attending to the dinner. Claude understands the joke when he notices that Vincent had just looked at the novel called Adolphe among Pierre’s books, but says nothing. Finally Anna arrives, but the joke has not been cleared, so Pierre attacks her too about how stupid and inconsiderate such a choice is; Anna doesn’t know that he’s talking about Adolphe, she thinks he’s criticizing their choice of the name Henri, so she gets angry at his tone (and rightly so, I’ll add) and tells him that she won’t take any lecture on names from someone who called his children Apollin and Myrtille! Again, very rightly so, but now finally Vincent understands that things have gone too far, and explains to everyone that it was only a joke... but the words are out already, and Pierre never let’s anything go. From now on , they keep asking, answering and generally telling each other unpleasant things, Pierre more than anyone else, if we want to be honest; it comes out that Pierre thinks Vincent an egocentric, selfish narcissistic man; Vincent says that Pierre cares too much about what people think of him, that he’s a snob who gave his children absurd names just to be noticed, and that he’s a tightwad. They said that Babou put on a lot of weight when she was pregnant, and never regained her 
figure. Since Claude never takes a side, they attack him too revealing that Vincent used to call him “la prune”, ‘the plum’ because they all thought he was homosexual. He doesn’t understand at first but when they explain he gets angry that they talked that way behind his back because he’s not. He’s actually in a relationship with a woman, has been for some time, but never told them because the woman is Françoise, Babou and Vincent’s mother, 26 years older than him. They are all surprised that Anna knew and didn’t say anything, but Vincent is out of his mind, and when Claude tries to explain he pushes him down; Claude falls breaking the small table and possibly breaking his nose (that is not clear, but his face is all bloody). Babou is more angry because he never told her, and she thought they were best friends telling each other everything - which is not entirely true because she knew about Vincent’s nickname for Claude but never told him. Pierre is upset that she even told Claude about his sexual problems.
Anna is very upset at Vincent’s behaviour, and demands that he apologizes to Claude. At the end, Babou starts screaming asking who’s ever to apologize to her! She takes it all out, that Pierre is probably ashamed of her because she doesn’t have an important degree like he has, that she sacrificed her career for him, that he wanted children but never does anything for them or with them, that she has to do everything, for the children and in the house - literally everything, I noticed this before, she has a job too but at home he never does a single thing. She gets up and goes to the children when they call, she answers the door every time, she cleans and cooks, she waits on him at dinner and he never even pretends to want to help her; since she complains that they always talk when she’s not present, Pierre even complains that she should stay with them, as if the dinner could serve itself. 
Babou also complains that Vincent was always their parents’ favourite because he was the funny one, that he never had to do anything at home because they would have her do it. 
Anna takes Claude home, Babou goes to bed, and Pierre tells Vincent that he can sleep on the couch, revealing that he has done so himself many times, and that therefore his marriage is not the perfect one they all thought it was. 
The movie doesn’t stop here, though, only the dinner. They are a family after all, so they show us that when Vincent and Anna’s baby is born, and turns out to be a girl, the whole family joins them at the hospital: Babou with Pierre and Françoise with Claude, and the baby will be called Françoise. 
ITA cena tra amici

8 femmes - 2002

A strange film, I was enjoying it, but I was sadly disappointed by the awful ending (still nice visually, but awful story-wise).Someone might consider it a brilliant switch ( :-/ not really) or even a macabre-funny switch, but I couldn’t help seeing it the wrong way :-/ I hate its ending.

STORY: Marcel lives in a home with six women: his wife Gaby (Catherine Deneuve), his mother-in-law (Danielle Darrieux), his daughter Catherine (Ludivine Sagnier), his sister-in-law Augustine (Isabelle Huppert), and two maids: Chanel (Firmine Richard) and Louise (Emmanuelle Béart). 

His other daughter Suzon (Virginie Ledoyen) comes home from college for the Christmas holidays. He also has a sister, Pierrette (Fanny Ardant), who occasionally asks him money. When Louise enters Marcel’s room to wake him up and sees a knife in his back, the whole thing starts. He’s been murdered! But Louise never heard the dogs barking, so it can’t be a stranger… they should call the police but someone cut the phone line, and it’s impossible for them to get there themselves because there’s too much snow and it’s still snowing.

They are all trapped inside, and this is it: eight women, suspicious of each other, with their secrets that come out one by one . Occasionally there’s a musical moment when they sing and do a little choreography: that’s very strange, but also rather fascinating in a way, and it’s nice that it’s part of the movie, the characters look at it like we do; I kinda thought what’s it got to do with it all? But then they’re nice musical numbers, very colourful and pleasant. My favourite is maybe the first one, before the murder is discovered.

When Louise screams that he’s dead, Catherine runs up to lock the room and take the key to preserve the room for the police, but Gaby wants to see so she goes up with her sister, but then close it again afraid that the murderer might still be there…

One by one they reveal each other’s secrets plus some of their own: Suzon had secretly come the night before to tell her dad that she was pregnant without being married, and he accepted her: her mom doesn’t. Gaby and Marcel had been sleeping in separate rooms for a while now and she told him that same night that she wanted to leave him for his business partner.

Also, it is revealed that Gaby was already pregnant when she married Marcel: her previous boyfriend died and Marcel married her raising Suzon as his own daughter. Well, more or less since later she confesses to Catherine, and only to her, that Marcel is the father of her baby!! I mean, what?? She didn’t seem to know that he wasn’t her real father! and yet she made a baby with him?!?!?? That’s disgusting and terrible! That was really unnecessary :-///

Grandma refused to help him with her money because she’s really greedy: after all he accepted to have both her and Augustine live in his house at his expense!

Pierrette that night asked him money that she then gave to the man she loved: Marcel’s business partner!

Augustine had a fancy for him and Louise was his lover. Chanel was simply in love with Pierrette, nothing to do with him.

I was very pleased with how the film was never boring, and how I was amused and interested in knowing the next secret revelation! It was very enjoyable, but then the last switch came and ruined everything. It was actually a three-part switch: first part wasn’t really a surprise to me: Marcel was not dead, just pretended to be to find out their truths;

that he was not dead was not really a big surprise because nobody had checked if he was dead, they just said he was, watching from a distance. In that situation someone should have checked if he was really dead or maybe still breathing, if there was something they could do :-/

second: Catherine was the accomplice, actually the plan maker. She had been a witness of how the whole family treated him and planned the whole thing; third: after she reveals it all, she takes the key and goes to his room saying that she loves him, that the two of them will go away , far away from them, that she’s the only one that wants him to be happy, but when she enters the room he has a gun in his hand, and while looking at her he shoots himself dead: that was awful and unreasonable and unacceptable.

I hate this ending because he killed himself in front of his sixteen-year-old daughter, right after she had said how much she loved him! Sure, that might not seem the best way to show it, but she was 16!

Besides, why? What was so devastating?? That Gaby wanted to leave him? Sad, yes, but many people get divorced, and it wasn’t out of the blue at all. He knew it, like he knew that Pierrette wanted money from him, that’s not reason for suicide! Yes, he had also money problems, but now that the truths were out, Gaby or Augustine or the girls would have helped him with that! I mean, I understand that it was a crappy situation, and he was in a really bad place, and all that, and sometimes money problems combined with marital problems can lead a person to suicide, many things can lead someone there actually, but I’ll never, ever accept that a father would do it like this; I’d understand it if she had found him already dead, with maybe a suicide note by his side, but not this way: hearing her say that she loves him, waiting for her (his own 16-y-o. daughter) to enter, than have her look straight at him while he raises the gun to his head and pulls the trigger, blowing his head off in front of her eyes! Unacceptable. 

That’s what I meant, I was enjoying it, this weird film full of great actresses, full of colour and music, but then they went too far. I don’t know why they did it like that, and why they had to add that Marcel was the father of Suzon’s baby, it was completely unnecessary and frankly quite revolting on her part. It ruined everything, even the final song (grandma sings very well) and I’m never going to watch this thing again. Disgusting.

ITA8 donne e un mistero

La famille Beliér - 2014

It has a good start, then it went slowly down for me, but it had a beautiful finale which is a very important thing. The ending is beautiful, it leaves you well and touches the heart. It is certainly a movie I’d recommend and watch again; even if there were pieces in the middle that made me mad, there were other moments that were funny or lovely.

The Bélier family consists of mother, father, son and a daughter, Paula (Louane Emera). Its peculiarity is that only Paula can speak, the others are deaf, so she helps them connect to the world. They have a farm, and she’s the one who speaks on the phone to the vet when necessary, translates when they go to their doctor, that keeps their affairs in order and sells their products at the market. They are different from other people in many ways: they are always cheerful and very direct, so much that Paula has to ‘interpret’ what they are saying when she translates for others :-p They are lovely in many ways, in how much they love each other for example, but also rather odd, so much in their own world that don’t think it weird in any way to shake Paula’s stained pants in front of her singing partner, lost in their joy that she’s growing up and ‘becoming a woman’. That was so embarrassing… 

Things get complicated when she joins the choir course at school and her teacher spots her and convinces her she should try entering a school in Paris because she has a beautiful voice. She’s in a difficult position because of course she loves her family and she worries about what they’d do without her, but she also like the idea of going to Paris and sing.

She tries to hide it at first, takes private singing lessons with her teacher, and the desire to try it grows in her. Meanwhile her father has decided to run for mayor…

When she tells her family, it doesn’t go well, her parents feel like she’s betraying them, leaving them for the other world, and here came the worst bit of the film, when her mother told her that she hates hearing people.. which is a bad thing to say to a hearing person, specially if it’s your daughter, but of course she does not hate her daughter, she loves her but is hurt that she wishes to leave them… until the day of the school recital arrives. They attend as well, but of course can’t hear her sing. Still, they can see all the people there, deeply appreciating the song, tears in their eyes. A peculiar thing is that we always heard the same little bit of the song, never more of it, and during the recital we watched it as they watched it, in silence. This is because we’ll hear it later: that night, her father asks her to sing it for him, and he places his hand on her neck, and in a way that I can’t describe it’s touching, and he understood. Early in the morning he wakes everyone up and drives them all to Paris, just in time for the audition. She sings another song, she sings Je Vole, she sings “mes chers parents je pars, je vous aime mais je pars” and “je ne m’enfuis pa je vole, comoprenez bien je vole” which means my dear parents I’m leaving, I love you but I’m leaving, I’m not running away, I’m flying, understand well I’m flying . 

It’s a beautiful scene because while she sings she translates for her family in the sign language, so they can understand… it’s really a beautiful scene. They understand that she loves them but simply wants to follow her own path, meet her own future, and let her go.

ITA la famiglia Bélier

La belle et la bête - 2014

It wasn't bad but I didn't like it much because it paid too much attention on appearances and futile details and not enough to those emotions that should have been the heart of it. It starts with a long part in which this family is introduced: a rich merchant who loses his fortune when his ships sink or disappear; his three sons, very plain and one of them stupid enough to owe a lot of money to bad people; his three daughters: two who keep whining all the time because they can't afford riches anymore, and the youngest - Belle - who must have been adopted because she's lively, optimistic, sweet, who loves her sisters and likes to work in her vegetable garden (Léa Seydoux). I think too much screen-time was lost with all these money problems and whining. Let's not even talk of her garden, and the scene while she works in it, so fake and unbelievable, with those pumpkins..
Anyway, the merchant 'thinks' he's about to get his fortune back, so the daughters ask for gifts: clothes and jewels for the stupid vain girls and a rose for Belle (like in the original fairytale I think, here she says it's the only thing that won't grow in her garden... ). The man goes, only to discover that he has nothing. During his way back, he gets lost, his horse is hurt. He sees a house (big house, more of a castle) which is not locked so he goes inside! Sure, go on.
Once he's in, he sees a big table full of food of any kind when candles lit as by magic, and he's all "I'm hungry" and eats a lot. Then other lights are lit by magic and he sees rich things, exactly what his two daughters had asked for. So he takes all that stuff!! Just like that! I mean, you see a light on and you're certain it's an invitation for you to take all their stuff!!! Still he keeps calling himself a good honest man.
Outside the house he takes a roses for Belle , et voilà, now the beast is angry because 'his gifts were not enough, the man had to steal his precious rose'. The man can go saying goodbye to his family but must come back or his sons and daughters will be killed. Belle is like 'everybody blames me because mother died to give me life, I won't let you die because you brought me a rose' so she goes instead, and they can't follow her because only that horse can enter the magic forest. Finally Belle goes to the beast's castle, but only sees him at dinner. She finds beautiful dresses and jewels and each day she wears them. Not just that, but every morning she comes out of her room with splendid hairstyles, and I would very much like to know who does her hair!
Every night she has visions of the past when the beast was a prince obsessed with the idea of hunting a golden deer. His bride-to-be had him promise he would stop, but he didn't, he killed the beautiful, poor creature only to discover it was his girlfriend, who was actually a nymph, a daughter of the God of Nature or something like that. She wanted to know love and met him (how lucky..) and she still loves him enough to beg his father not to kill him. Still, the prince is transformed into a beast.
Belle misses her family and makes a deal with him: a dance in exchange for a day with my family. They believed her dead, instead she comes back with rich clothes and jewels, so two of her brothers steal them in an attempt to repay the debts. They offer all the 'abandoned-castle' 's riches to the bad man; they all go there and the bad guys break and steal everything they can. They are all killed by stone giants but the gang leader almost kills the beast. Belle has her brother bring him inside where some magic water can cure him, and here she tells him she loves him, thus breaking the curse. The prince goes back to look like Vincent Cassel and the strange creatures in the castle go back to be lovely dogs. Nothing is told about all the people that lived or hunted with him, I suppose they don't matter..  :-/ so they all died, is that it?
Now, who can tell me how it happened that Belle fell in love? After the dance she still despised him, then she saw him in her dream kill a defenceless deer for fun only and shed a tear over his girlfriend's dead, naked body, and bang: eternal love is born... why?? It's absurd, it makes no sense at all. They should have spent a little time on scenes between them, to give her a reason, whatever reason!!
This is why I didn't like it. It was all beautiful dresses, beautiful scenery, but no heart.

… well, he did save her, but he put her at risk first, he broke the ice she was on. He let her go to visit her family, but he did make a deal, so it’s not that big a gesture… he gave her a rose, yes, and some magic water to cure her should she get hurt, and he says he’ll die if she doesn’t come back… 

ITA la bella e la bestia
ENG the beauty and the beast

Populaire - 2012

It's a French film, very nice. I liked it all, but the ending. A man is very determined to make young Rose (who left her father's home to be modern and feminist and get a job to maintain herself) the best typist of France. Rose Pamphyle (Déborah François) accepts mostly because she likes Louis (Romain Duris). A character I like a lot is Marie (Bérénice Bejo), Louis' ex girlfriend, now married to Bob, who likes both him and Rose :-) She loved Louis, but he went to war without a promise, and Bob offered her a life together, and she made her choice and sticks to it; Bob loves her, they have two children and she's happy now, feeling loved. Louis has Rose exercise every day, a lot. He has Marie giving her piano lessons, and she wins the competition in her part of France, then she also beats the French champion, and at this point Louis leaves her. He says he only wanted her to win, and slept with her because that was what she needed, and that without the competition nothing would have happened between them. He speaks so because he thinks he can't help her anymore, and believes she's good enough to win the world competition and beat the US champion. Rose goes on alone, appearing on tv and papers, magazine covers and signing autographs. When the world competition starts, she gets to the final stage: the finalists are of course France and USA. She wins a round, the American girl wins the second one. At this point Rose walks backstage. Louis has arrived to make peace and tell her he loves her. Love wins, of course, but the competition's not over, and what does she do? She takes the old typewriter her father sent to her, because it is a sentimental move, and she always said she didn't like the new one with the keys so close. She uses the old one and wins, which is absurd because after you've spent months training with a 'small' keyboard you can't be that fast with a 'big' one without even a minute to get again used to it, but it's not enough. The keys stuck together as it often happened with those typewriters, so imagine: the American girl goes on while Rose has to separate each key before she can type again, and yet she wins, which is stupid because those seconds lost should have made her lose. The two girls were close to each other, both really fast, so the tiniest problem should have cost her the title. So, stupid ending, but otherwise very nice film.


In Italy: Tutti pazzi per Rose

Switch - 2011

A French film. Sophie Malaterre (Karine Vanasse) is a Canadian unemployed girl and one day a woman suggests a change, a vacation: exchange your house with someone else in the world and have a cheap vacation! Sophie is all yayyy what a fantastic idea, to have a complete stranger stay in my house! and she goes on that site, switch.com and arranges it with a French girl: Bénédicte Serteaux (Karina Testa). They do all by mail and email, they never meet. Sophie goes to Paris all happy, she can see Tour Eiffel so near from this house! Next day she wakes up feeling sick, has a shower (first time we see her naked, but not the last. She's beautiful, yes, but the story didn't need either this or the other naked showers..) then the police barge in and arrest her, charging her with the murder of a guy: Thomas. She tries everything to convince them she's Sophie, not Benedicte, but it's all against her. The site has been cancelled, the blood type is the same... so she tries with: call a dentist, if it works for the dead it'll work for the living, but the stupid dentist cares only about his tennis match , nothing for her life, so she reacts and escapes. She takes Detective Damien Forgeat (ex football player Eric Cantona)'s gun and starts running away. She gets some money robbing a cute Japanese girl in a Fiat 500, uses them to buy new clothes at a shop own by what seems to be the only good man in Paris at the moment, and starts her search for anything that might prove her identity. She's quite good and smart, I was liking her a lot, but then she does something I would have never done: she calls her mother in Montreal telling her to go and take her documents at her house. Sure, she tells her to call the police, but didn't she know her mother? She calls nobody and goes there with a rifle, only to get her throat cut by Benedicte. Come on, to send your own mother to a murderer's house! Okay, she was in a terrible situation, but everyone's first concern should be to keep their family away from such danger, not send her right into it!
A couple of showers/baths and some more running, and Damien starts believing her. He finds out that Benedicte and dead Thomas were born with artificial insemination from the same donor: Sophie's father when he was out of money.
Benedicte wanted revenge, and she comes back to close it with Sophie. She gets her and takes her to a isolated place; this time it makes perfect sense that she doesn't simply shoot Sophie, because that's too simple and is not what she needs, but stupidly she doesn't take away Sophie's cell phone. Sophie calls Damien: she can't talk but they trace the call and get there in time to shoot Benedicte before she kills the hated sister who grew up with a loving father. It ends right there, with Sophie repeating: I'm not Benedicte!

De vrais mensonges - 2010

At first I thought it was a nice comedy, then it became too... I don't know, the word perverse comes to mind. Let me explain, it starts nicely, with hairdresser Emilie (Audrey Tautou) that receives an anonimous love letter, but she's not moved by it much. On the contrary, what does she do with it? She gives it to her mother Maddy ( Nathalie Baye), a beautiful lady who is kind of depressed because her husband left her. Emilie makes her believe that it was written for her, hoping this would cheer her up, and then she starts writing new letters to her herself. She asks Jean ( Sami Bouajila), a guy working at her shop, to deliver them. When Maddy sees him, she convinces herself that he's her secret admirer, and funnily enough he did write the first letter, because he's secretly in love with Emilie! Not knowing this, Emilie wants him to play along, pretending to be her mother's admirer and date her. In a way she meant well, because her mother was feeling lonely and not herself, so she gave her something to cheer her up. It stopped being nice fun when they turned this film into a soap-opera TheBoldAndTheBeautiful-style, with mom and daughter with the same guy. I may be old school, but I don't like this kind of things. Making him sleep with the mother and then end up with the daughter.. no sorry but I don't like it. What's more, he's the victim in all this, because the two women decided everything themselves! The poor guy was in love with Emilie the whole time, wrote her that nice love letter, and was treated like a gigolò, forced to be one.
I know it's a French film, so they probably have a different way of looking at this things, a "who cares? let's do it" kind of attitude towards sex, but still the fact that the mother would sleep with Jean to get back at them both, after knowing that it was all a lie, was sick. I see no reason for ever watching this again.