My Wife Is an Actress

I'm not familiar with French films, but I purposely bought this film because I am a long-time fan of Terence Stamp. And as always I am never disappointed in his presence on the screen. Ivan Attal was hilarious as the jealous husband -a very talented, animated actor. Charlotte did a fine job, but seemed low energy or bored most of the time. The attraction between Charlotte and Terence was laughable. I caught that amusement in Terence's behavior whenever he was around her -he really couldn't care less, could he, but why not try? His lack of enthusiasm was evident when he approached Charlotte's assistant with: "Well, what are YOU doing tonight?"

At the end of the "I'm pregnant!" scene, I wanted to know: Whose baby?

"My Wife is an Actress" is all about a man who becomes jealous of his wife's handsome costar when she's required to do boudoir scenes. A so-so romantic comedy with precious little romance, this flick fails to focus on the central question which asks: How do you know if your wife is cheating de facto, in heart or mind, while she performs in bed with another man for the cameras? Instead, the film ruminates about the jealous husband and the tentative wife with occasional excursions into a whole side matter about circumcision which contributes nothing while managing to conjure up a few delightfully clever scenes. With good art, excellent camera work, and solid performances, this half English, half French flick makes for a nominal subtitled watch best saved for broadcast. (B-)

Director/writer/co-star Yvan Attal is actually married to co-star Charlotte Gainsbourg, an effervescent and shimmering bilingual (French/English) beauty. And they both can act.

This is a comedy with a dark but non-violent edge. Gainsbourg plays "Charlotte," a star of both French and English films who graciously dispenses autographs left and right and during dinner at restaurants. Attal plays "Yvan," a doting but increasingly disturbed sportscaster who wears down dealing with his wife's intrusive fans and, more critically, his mounting fears that she is having it off with her aging but still presumably babe-magnet co-star in a London studio filming, "John" (Terence Stamp)

Yvan apparently is underutilized at work because he has the time to brood deeply and split to London whenever his antagonistic feelings of longing for and suspicion of his spouse surface (which they do increasingly).

Stamp gives a delightful portrayal of an old actor whose wife doesn't understand him but he's straddling the pursuit of Charlotte with the subtle reality that he's getting a bit old for that sort of thing. Stamp brings a bemused actor's attempts at dalliance to life.

There's an extraneous sub-plot in which Yvan's sister, seriously Jewish, belabors her non-Jewish husband to agree to be circumcised as they await the birth of their first child. This irrelevant and uninteresting side story at least stretches the film out to a barely respectable 93 minutes, justifying the $10 admission.

There are amusing scenes, the best being when Charlotte negotiates with her frenetic director for terms on which to appear naked in a scene. The resolution is both predictable and hilarious.

While few of us have mates or lovers who are in the public eye as Charlotte is, Yvan's increasing jealousy will strike a familiar chord with many viewers. In real life happy endings to episodes of mounting distrust, approaching paranoia, are few.

A good, enjoyable film. But now I'm wondering about the real life marriage of Yvan and Charlotte.

7/10.

Charlotte Gainsbourg has starred in `The Little Thief' in French and `The Cement Garden' in English and in about 26 other movies. She's been in films at least since she was thirteen, so it seems surprising she's only 31. Her parents were Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, both French cinema and pop culture icons. In this movie with the straightforward title, `My Wife Is an Actress,' her longtime companion and the father of their child, Yvan Attal, directs her and plays her husband in a story about an actress named Charlotte (who's famous) and her sports writer husband named Yvan (who's not), and the problems he has with this simple fact: she's a movie star; he's not.

It might have been more truthful to call the movie `My Wife Is More Famous Than I Am,' because Yvan Attal isn't an unknown sports writer; he's a movie actor too, and he's been in 23 movies himself, including the excellent `Love Without Pity' (`Un monde sans pitié, 1989), directed by Eric Rochant. He's just not as famous as Charlotte, and this is the first full-length film he's directed. What's it like to be constantly reminded that your wife is more popular and better known at the same thing that you do? That might be a more interesting subject, if less suitable for light romantic comedy, which is what `Ma femme est une actrice' aims to be. Yvan Attal has cast himself as a kind of everyman, a little guy.

Regardless of your occupation, you might be jealous, if your wife were making out with actors in front of the camera all the time. That's what gets through to Yvan – the movie Yvan -- when an annoying fellow introduced to him at a bar by his tiresome obsessively Jewish sister, Nathalie (Noémie Lvovsky) keeps harping on the issue. If Ivan had cast himself as an actor, he might be more understanding; and in the movie, he takes acting lessons to gain more sympathy for Charlotte's career. His success auditioning as a flower bursting into bloom leads him into a little affair with a young aspiring actress – but the affair doesn't bloom; it just leads to a misunderstanding with Charlotte.

The base line feeling the movie deals with -- annoyance at having a famous movie star wife -- comes though strongest in the early scenes when Charlotte and Yvan are going around Paris and she's constantly being asked for her autograph -- and he's not. It isn't good for his ego that while he can't reserve a table before midnight at a restaurant, if she comes on the phone there's one ready at nine.

The jealousy Yvan feels about Charlotte's playing nude love scenes is a concern that goes deeper, but this is developed indirectly, by having Charlotte get bothered by the idea herself after talking to Yvan, then making a fuss about it at Pinewood Studios in England, leading to a colorful scene. While the London film is being shot, Yvan keeps going back and forth on the train to visit her. This is where his `sports writer' role evaporates. He exists only as a jealous husband. Eventually he has an encounter with his wife's British costar, an older actor with sex appeal -- "John" – Terrence Stamp. Perhaps there is nothing more in danger of seeming inauthentic, or more difficult to make interesting, than essentially playing yourself, as Gainsbourg and Stamp, and to a lesser extent Attal, are doing here.

I remembered Charlotte Gainsbourg as a spoiled, pouting creature, and was afraid I wouldn't want to see her as herself. In fact she's charming, light as air, always conveying the impression of the smooth professional, and it's fascinating to watch somebody who can act as fluently in English as she can in French. It's an extra attraction to see Terence Stamp playing an aging English actor. But he's so laid back about his courtship of Charlotte that all the energy goes out of the scenes he's in.

Nathalie, the ultra-Jewish sister, becomes the movie's biggest annoyance. She seems to be present to make us aware of the fact that Yvan's Jewish (Attal was born in Tel Aviv), a fact that has nothing to do with his character. Nathalie has a `goy' husband and she's pregnant. They are constantly arguing about whether the husband should get circumcised and the baby, if a boy, should be. A tired enough issue, made more so by its constant repetition. This running unfunny joke is made even less funny by the fact that Nathalie, the pregnant woman, always has a cigarette in her hand or in her mouth, and continues to smoke like a chimney even with the newborn baby in the room. Another annoyance of this movie is that it contains some homophobic and anti-Arab remarks, and they're not ironic, they're just there.

The tousled haired Yvan is appealing enough to arouse sympathy for his plight – at first. His character has only one note, sung over and over. The movie lasts only 95 minutes, but seems about 35 minutes too long.

`My Wife Is an Actress' begins well and deserves credit for approaching its topic head-on, without any dodges other than Yvan's becoming a `sports writer' rather than a less famous actor. The problem is attacked persistently, but there's no solution found. One ends with the feeling that this was a kind of therapy for Yvan Attal. He does get pretty close to his subject. Perhaps he was too close to it already. If he'd gotten any closer, things might have gotten nasty.

This film had a real chance of success. The basic premise--How does a man feel when his wife is famous and he isn't?--holds lots of creative possibilities.

Unfortunately, these possibilities are never realized. We never understand why a famous actor would want this lout of a sportswriter as her husband. (Incidentally, he is the only sportswriter I know

who never appears to have a deadline.)

The movie is miscast. The wife, Charlotte Gainsbourg, is supposed to be drop-dead beautiful in the context of the film, and Ms. Gainsbourg is certainly attractive, but not at that level. Also, Terence Stamp, the third side of the triangle, is supposed to be miraculously attractive to young women, and I don't see that either. It is one thing to suspend disbelief, but another to throw disbelief out the window.

A subplot about the husband's sister, who is Jewish, and her pregnancy never works. In fact, as a physician, all I could do was cringe as the sister smoked throughout her pregnancy. I think that was supposed to be charming.

We get so few French movies in Upstate New York that I hate to criticize the ones we do get, but this movie is just not worth the price of admission, no matter how starved we are for French films.