Rien à faire

What a superb, moving, powerful little romance drama, so convincing in the performances as well in the acting. This kind of film is not ordinarily my stuff, but there I was purely astonished. It sounds so real, so authentic, showing ordinary people for ordinary situations. You can'y feel ice cold in front such a story. Not bankable actors but so great. It is so bittersweet, without being gloomy either. French movie industry is very rich when it comes to provide such movies. And Marion Vernoux the female director is a true sensitive film maker whose features are really riveting, worth the watching.

"Rien à faire" is a watchable and enjoyable flick for one main reason. Marion Vernoux, the director had intuition by choosing Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi for the main role. It is a real joy to see fer acting on the screen and her big talent, her soft voice are widely sufficient to justify the vision of this film. It is all the more beneficial as she's ably assisted by her main partner Patrick Dell'Isola.

Marion Vernoux put very well in parallel her two main actors' living conditions. The contrast constitutes one of her best weapons between the naive and the simple-minded Marie and Pierre who appears as a lucid and clever man. This contrast is highlighted when the director evokes difference and misunderstanding about several points commented by the two characters. Another interesting detail: the supermarket plays the role of meeting between the two universes.

Then, the author built her movie around one of the biggest plagues at the end of the twentieth century: unemployment. So, you could expect to discover a bleak and hopeless atmosphere. It is not the case. The relative seriousness of the situation remains confined in the background. A certain joy of living comes out of the film. Marie and Pierre are jobless but while searching for a job, they take time to know themselves, to help each other and eventually to fall in love. Marion Vernoux lets us suggest the reasons why they become lovers. You feel that Marie gets on rather badly with her husband (Sergi Lopez). As for Pierre, he falls in love with Marie, mainly because he doesn't succeed in finding a job again.

However, this work isn't without a few faults. Certain sequences can be judged as conventional (like the one when Pierre explains to Marie why he wants to put an end to their love affair) and I think an extra touch of passion would have given the movie more strength.

Anyway, I repeat it: this movie is worth watching especially for Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and given the treatment Marion Vernoux made of her subject, her work can be taken for a cousin of the movie: "en avoir ou pas..." (1995) by Laetitia Masson.

The French, realistically-shot 1999 film "Rien à Faire" was broadcast on Norwegian television some weeks ago, and being a huge fan of French cinema I watched the film starring Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Patrick Dell' Isola. The leads performed very well, especially Tedeschi as the subdued, insecure Marie-Do. In fact, the film ultimately comes down to the acting, because director Vernoux to some degree fails to keep up interest throughout the (appr.) ninety minutes.

As a study of distinction in French society, though, this film has some relevance to the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. In the beginning of the film, Marie-Do and her family's tastes in food and wine are compared with those of Pierre (Dell' Isola), as the two meet randomly in a Supermarket. Pierre is the middle-class handsome man who meet a working-class woman without confidence. After a while, though, we learn that Marie-Do and Pierre share a common fate: They are both unemployed. They start hanging out during their empty days (a good English title!), and the viewers just wonder when the anticipated affair will set off. Although they are very different, they find things to talk about and develop a good friendship, before they begin having sex and it all falls apart. Marie is given much attention by Pierre, and as her husband is more concerned with union work and "the revolution" than with even seeing her for who she is, it it not so strange that she wants to have an affair. She is sadly ignored in her family life, and the affair only supplies her with more sympathy. For Pierre, though, the sympathy decreases as we learn he has been married before, and was unfaithful with his previous wife as well.

This is the type of film that cannot end well for both, and that is great, because it would never have worked out in real life, either. So I do not find the depressing theme disturbing, in fact it is the best part of the film, along with the acting. But it is at times unfocused and I feel it also is at times a bit misanthropic. But that might be my viewpoint, and not others'.

The plot is not original in the least. It's the story of a lonely woman who lives a boring life and who meets a man who is bored too, they are both unemployed and it seems to be the only thing they have in common. They have an affair, and finally he leaves her. And that's all. I have seen this kind of stories too many times. And it lasts almost 2 hours...

The first part of the film is quite good. As soon as they stay in the supermarket, Marie-Do and Pierre are really moving. It gets worse later.

Not because of the actor's performances, they're all quite good. Just that the second part leads much more place to the kind of "silent conversations" you can have with someone you love, and that only you and her/him can understand. What happens here is that we understand, but we're getting a bit bored by their meaningful looks without a sound. On the whole, it isn't bad, just disappointing to see the second part far behind the first one.