The Seducer's Diary/Le Journal du Seducteur
France, 1995; French with English subtitles
There is always a point in a movie where you sort of know "it's downhill from here," and this movie is full of them. For me it was when various organs were pulled out of a corpse. For Tony it was seeing the hickey on Claire's (Chiara Mastroianni) neck in her analyst's office. If you were to judge Paris by the characters in this movie, you would assume the whole city was stark raving mad. Almost everyone seems to have a problem, a crazed look, or something to hide. These are often interesting elements in good movies; here is is more annoying than anything else. The only really funny, well-written moment is when the analyst (Hubert Saint-Macary), completely distracted by the book Claire has left with him, blows off a new client by succinctly summarizing that life is rather pointless, and that in time he will get over being lovelorn and find someone else.
The movie is well filmed and finds isolated parts of Paris that accentuate the creepiness of most of the characters. The entire diegetic time of the film is the visit to Rue Mazarin by analyst Hubert with his doctor; Hubert is trying to remember something that has happened to him; the entire movie then is a flashback that explains how he got into this state,but in a very roundabout way. Hubert turns out to be the least of the story. There is Gregoire, who seduces Claire and others by giving them a copy of Kierkegaard's "Diary of a Seducer." Then there is slacker Sebastian, who cons his way into Claire's house so he can sleep on their couch, and eventually wants to con his way into her mother's (Anne, played by the film's director, Daniele Dubroux) bed. There are various other characters weaving in and out of the intermingled and uninteresting plots--Robert, the creepy neighbor of Gregoire; Diane, the crazed grandmother of Gregoire; Hugo, the suicidal gun-toting professor (a wasted cameo by Jean-Pierre Leaud, famous for his portrayal of Antoine Doinel in several Truffaut movies). Sometimes directors are successful in creating psychological thrillers where you are taken through a labyrinthian storyline that has a great payoff, like House of Games, or Hitchcock's Stage Fright; but Daniele Dubroux, whose credits and accomplishments are not as numerous as those more famous directors, is still going to have to prove herself.
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