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The characters might be miserable, but this rom-com is warm at heart
Not Here to Be Loved (15)
dir: Stéphane Brizé
Everyone knows the clichés: the French are explosive lovers and passionate bons vivants who gesticulate while holding a morsel of fine cheese in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. The drab English, meanwhile, dine on boiled starch, consider a handshake to be racy physical contact and wear their nightclothes buttoned up to the neck. So, it is appealing that although Not Here to Be Loved (Je ne suis pas à pour être aimé) features people eating baguettes as a post-work snack, the characters, on the whole, also behave as if they were raised in 1950s Kent.
Broadly speaking, Not Here to Be Loved is a romantic comedy, though the romance is tortuous and the comedy tentative. Jean-Claude (Patrick Chesnais) is a 51-year-old, divorced bailiff who delivers his legal papers with a resigned fatigue. He is the head of the family firm, but that is not the only tie that binds. Once a week, he dutifully visits his father (Georges Wilson) at his old people's home to play Monopoly and put up with the horrible old man's irascible abuse. Meanwhile, his son joins the firm, and there is a grim little celebration - a few peanuts, offered by the miserable secretary; some wine, drunk down like hemlock.
So far, so miserable, yet the audience is quickly made aware that Jean-Claude is a dark horse. Spying on the dance studio opposite his office, he assays a little soft-shoe shuffle, his arm wrapped around an imaginary warm body. When his doctor warns him about the state of his heart (the first moment when "Metaphor!" might as well flash above the screen in neon letters), he decides to venture over the road to dance classes, where he meets the younger - though not spring-chickenish - Françoise (Anne Consigny). As you might expect, she is another lost soul, also strangled by a quietly dysfunctional family. A school counsellor who recognises Jean-Claude from when his mother used to be her childminder, Françoise is engaged to Thierry (Lionel Abelanski), a struggling novelist. He is the kind of "novelist" who spends a lot of time watching TV, yet still keeps missing the dance classes supposed to help prepare him for his wedding.
It's thus left to Jean-Claude and Françoise to learn to tango together. As metaphors for repressed passion go, the tango is a little unsubtle - in fact, if you met it at a dance class it would be stomping heavily on your feet in a pair of hobnailed boots. The film is saved, however, by the neat economy of its storytelling and dialogue. For a film in which dancing plays such a role, the actors must convey a great deal of passion without speaking, and there's no doubt that Consigny and Chesnais make a touching couple. It's Strictly Glum Dancing: him looking as if he's being crowbarred out of his comfort zone, like a mollusc out of its shell, and her seeming to be on the brink of embarrassed laughter. Thankfully, the familial relationships are also less laboured than the symbolism.
Françoise's family is quickly painted in ghastly colours, most of all her domineering, wedding seating-plan-obsessed mother, who tells Thierry: "You don't know how long she's waited for this." It's a line that conveys a whole history of maternal pestering. For his part, Jean-Claude's emotions are restrained between his steely hairline and rigid moustache. Chesnais generates a tremendous look of almost palpable disgust when his son talks about his beloved plants.
The scene where he tries to buy some perfume for Françoise is painfully hilarious. After extensive testing, he is told that the one he likes is called Intense Passion. "Would you have the same perfume with a different name?" he asks, recoiling beautifully.
There's a James Thurber cartoon that shows a family - children, dog, parents - slumped in a dejected fug. "Well, I'm disenchanted, too. We're all disenchanted," reads the caption. And that is the creeping truth which unites these characters. Yet, underneath the sense of lost aspirations - Jean-Claude was a child tennis champion, his son yearns to tend his plants, his secretary has a past, his father has a secret - this is a film that believes everyone has a hidden warmth; that there is good in us all, even bailiffs. It's as soft-centred as a box of Valentine's Day chocs: Intense Passion distilled into charming notes and sold over the counter at a department store. Not so much the tango, as a gentle waltz.
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The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (15)
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Filipino film about a 12-year-old boy who falls for a no-nonsense policeman in the slums of Manila.
Taking Liberties (12A)
dir: Chris Atkins
Michael Moore-style polemic about the erosion of our civil liberties.
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