WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY (Sony Classics) Starring: Garance Clavel, Zinedine Soualem, Renee LeCalm, Olivier Py. Screenplay: Cedric Klapisch. Producers: Aissa Djabri, Farid Lahouassa, Manuel Munz. Director: Cedric Klapisch. MPAA Rating: R (adult themes, sexual situations, profanity) Running Time: 92 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
The Paris of Cedric Klapisch's disarming comedy WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY is no City of Lights. Quaint neighborhoods are vanishing as elderly residents are evicted to make way for upscale cafes and trendy boutiques. Wrecking crews clear away old buildings to make way for the new. Lovers in love have given way to a parade of lonely hearts trying to connect in bars and alleyways. Paris has rarely looked more modern -- or less romantic -- on film.
This is the Paris discovered by a young single woman named Chloe (Garance Clavel) when she is forced by the disappearance of her beloved cat Gris-Gris to get out of her apartment. Gris-Gris, along with Chloe's gay roommate Michel (Olivier Py), is one of the few dependable male figures in her life, giving her plenty of incentive to track him down. Instead of her cat, however, Chloe finds plenty of reminders that she is not alone in her loneliness. Her neighbor Madame Renee (the charming Renee LeCalm) surrounds herself with pets, another neighborhood woman (Gisele Laquit) holds conversations with her dead husband's ashes, and a shy fellow named Djamel (Zinedine Soualem) develops a crush on Chloe while helping her search for Gris-Gris.
Though this all may sound quite depressing, it's actually nothing of the kind. Klapisch finds none of his subjects pathetic; he looks upon them with a subtle bemusement, admiring their ability to persevere and to adapt to the world around them. He has a particularly good time with Chloe, played with an arresting sweetness by Garance Clavel. Some of the film's cleverest scenes, including a seaside vacation rendered in one five-second shot of Chloe swimming alone in the ocean, capture Clavel playing a woman trying to pretend she is resigned to her fate. The film's final optimistic note makes her struggles all the more appealing.
The episodic nature of WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY does grow wearying after a while, with several encounters dissolving before they even register with the viewer. There isn't much narrative momentum to Chloe's adventures -- WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY functions mostly as a walking tour of contemporary Parisian heartache, emphasis on the "walking" -- but there is a genuineness to each one. The many characters in WHEN THE CAT'S AWAY are looking for love in a lot of the wrong places, but at least most of them are still looking. Chloe's quest is really a search for the romantic Paris of song and story, one which may no longer exist, though it may please the heart to believe that it does.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 cat's meows: 7.
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