JEANNE AND THE PERFECT GUY (French with English Subtitles)
A review by Mark R. Leeper in bullet-list form
from the Toronto Internation Film Festival
CAPSULE: How do you tell a now fairly familiar love story set in the time of AIDS? The French do it by turning it into a light musical. Virginie Ledoyen is charming as a young woman who finds her new lover is HIV-positive. Rating: 7 (0 to 10), low +2 (-4 to +4)
- Directed by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau - The musical is not my favorite genre of film. Musicals got too big with ornate production numbers in the US and fell apart of their own weight. Woody Allen tried his own hand at the musical with EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU. It just did not work for me. The French have a better approach. They do not build the story around huge production numbers. They just tell their story and at various moments a character will sing a simple song. Perhaps there will be a few dance steps. - Virginie LeDoyen plays a switchboard operator who rarely is lacking a bed-partner. But Jeanne is anxious to find a perfect lover. She finds one, Olivier LaGrange (Mathieu Demy), on the underground, only to find he is HIV positive. Without her realizing it they have a mutual friend, a gay school professor who knows Olivier from ACT-UP, the AIDS activist group. - Hard to imagine Jeanne is this promiscuous and this is the first time she has been touched by AIDS. - Musical numbers seem to start up very naturally. Often they are on unexpected subjects like Tsing-tao Beer or foreign workers singing how they cannot get naturalization papers. - Most of the plot twists are predictable. - Last scene of film very different that what we would have in an American film.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1998 Mark R. Leeper
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