Pardon My French
The Age
Tuesday August 4, 2009
GREATER UNION, 7pmThe French comedies that play in Australian cinemas are mostly terrible, but this one breaks the mould. Chiara Mastroianni is magnificently funny as a depressive novelist who chain-smokes, drinks too much coffee and bakes cakes with broken eggshells in her sleep €” in short, does everything but write. Stuck in a rut, she's pursued by a red-haired teenager (Agathe Bonitzer) who keeps turning up like a bad centime. Taking her cues from a heroine who views reality as just another language game, writer-director Sophie Fillieres uses a plot full of non sequiturs as a pretext to capture Mastroianni's worried or giddy reaction. Incidentally, it would be a shame if anyone were to be put off this very pleasurable film by the embarrassing English title €” a replacement for Un Chat Un Chat, an idiom so untranslatable that those of us who aren't fluent speakers of French can only wonder how many more jokes we've missed.-- JAKE WILSON
© 2009 The Age