Patrice Leconte lets me down

reviewed December 2004

I've said before that director Patrice Leconte is just about the only French director I consistently like (and, hence, trust).  So I’m sorry to report that he’s finally let me down.

But not with The Hairdresser’s Husband (Le mari de le coiffeuse).  I would never have watched this had it not borne Leconte’s name, and I’ve have missed a sweet, lovely little film.  Jean Rochefort, so good in Leconte’s The Man on the Train, is wonderful as Antoine, who’s always dreamed of marrying a hairdresser.  He finally gets his chance when the melancholy (and much younger) Mathilde opens a salon in his town.  His courtship is delightful, and the movie has an understated, romantic charm – which is brutally shattered by an unnecessarily tragic ending.  It was one of those movies where I actually got pissed at the director for doing such a cruel thing to his two tremendously appealing characters.  Still, it’s worthy as a tender, low-key romance.

The movie that let me down was this year’s Intimate Strangers (Confidences trop intime), an obtuse, snoozy romance in which a meek accountant (is there any other kind?) is drawn into the rather messed-up life of a self-obsessed woman who initially mistakes him for a psychiatrist.  The accountant is actually more interesting than the drama queen who blows into his office, and that’s a problem.  Because when you don’t care about her drama and can’t see her appeal, there’s not a lot left to hang onto in the movie.  It doesn’t help that she’s played by Sandrine Bonnaire, one of those pouty, banal French actresses who mistakes chain-smoking for character development.  Leconte’s patented character study of a mismatched pair fails him here – the pair is too far apart to meet in the middle:  not because of their personalities, but because of the actors realizing them.

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