Régis Roinsard (2012)
Although she’s no good at other kinds of office work, young Rose Pamphyle (Déborah François) is a prodigiously quick typist. She gets a secretarial job with Louis Echard (Romain Duris), who runs a family-owned insurance agency in a small town in Normandy. Louis determines to enter Rose in a speed-typing competition. (The film’s title refers to a (real) make of typewriter, the Japy Populaire.) Régis Roinsard’s first feature describes Rose’s progress through the several rounds of the contest and the edgy development of a romance between her and Louis. The sub-headline of Philip French’s review in The Observer describes Populaire as a ‘thoughtful, witty French take on classic Hollywood romcoms’; French goes on to call it ‘a love letter to the underappreciated Hollywood movies of the 1950s, with a wonderful feeling for the textures of Technicolor’. The story is set in 1958 and it’s instantly clear from both its look and the arch performing style that this is the past in quotation marks. You want material like this, once you’ve got your bearings, to move from reproducing stock characters and situations to being inventive in its own right but Populaire is fundamentally lazy. Régis Roinsard, who co-wrote the screenplay with Daniel Presley and Romain Compingt, wants it both ways: weak, clichéd aspects of the material are to be excused as reflecting the limitations of the kind of film which Populaire imitates but Roinsard equally relies on generic elements to seduce the audience – he wants to reproduce the emotional climaxes and payoffs of the kind of film that he’s drawing on yet he can’t be bothered to give the characters persuasive motivations.
In a romantic comedy motivations don’t have to be realistic – in the sense of likely to occur in what the viewer considers to be the real world – in order to be persuasive. They do, though, need to make sense within the scheme of the movie. Why does Louis want Rose to enter a typing competition? Why is she inept as a secretary in every other way? (Her ineptitude is barely illustrated anyway.) Why is her widowed father so dead set against her leaving the village where he runs a store? (Frédéric Pierrot, physically too dynamic for this role, exposes its feebleness.) Why does the well-off, handsome Louis have no girlfriends – other than a vamp (Caroline Tillette) in a bar who appears briefly as a polar opposite of the unsullied heroine? Rose stays at Louis’s house so that he can personally supervise her rigorous training for the typing competition: once they’re alone together there why does so little happen between them for so long? The answer to the first question is meant to be that Louis didn’t pursue a promising sporting career and his father (Eddy Mitchell), largely because of this, considers his son a failure. So why would Louis try and redeem himself vicariously, choosing a competitive event which isn’t a sport – and so risk increasing his father’s contempt? The true answer to all these questions is of course that this is what the plot requires. Régis Roinsard may think the improbabilities can be excused as typical of the old Hollywood comedies that have inspired him but few of those comedies were as sparsely written as Populaire.
The only thing that’s original and amusing – although not as amusing as it should be, because here too the script isn’t sufficiently imaginative – is Roinsard’s treatment of the typing contest as if it were a major sporting event. He moves from the regional final in Normandy to the national final in Paris to world championships in New York – which include a live radio broadcast to France (and competitors each of whom is a cartoon national stereotype). The contestants’ increasingly vigorous pounding on their typewriters and the thudding carriage returns turn them into true combatants and their machines into weapons of warfare. I liked the magic of Rose’s first contact with a typewriter in her father’s store – this was partly because I could identify with the moment and, from this personal point of view, I was sorry that she didn’t remain a lightning two-fingered typist and become the first of her kind to take on the world (the kind of improbability I’d have been happy with). Still, at least Rose eventually discards – for the decisive final round of the competition – the Japy Populaire in favour of the old faithful Triumph. This is her Dad’s belated birthday gift, once he’s seen the error of his ways.
Populaire is very nice to look at and the colouring does indeed evoke the Technicolor and magazine illustrations of the period. (Not all the music does quite: I wasn’t sure that the inclusion of, for example, ‘Stranger On the Shore’ (1961) was deliberately anachronistic.) The people are agreeable to look at too but they don’t have good material to work with and Romain Duris’s Louis is a particular problem. According to Wikipedia, ‘Duris was initially concerned about whether the costumes and style would take over causing the film to be stuck in the past. He said he needed the film to feel live and real’. His concern was well-founded and you can sense his unease: although he has the style to go through the motions, Duris is uncomfortable doing so. Besides, Roinsard can’t decide why Louis is snarled up. A reference to traumatic experiences in the wartime resistance is quickly passed over and a bigger issue in Louis’s life seems to be missing out on marriage to Marie (Bérénice Bejo), who’s now the wife of Louis’s American friend Bob. The untidiness of this sub-plot and the confused emotions whirling round it, although in one sense they’re a welcome contrast to the prevailing style and tone of Populaire, are incongruous. Louis looks to be friends with Bob (well played by the Canadian actor Shaun Benson although the role is crudely written) only so that he can continue to see Marie. The sense of competition between the two men seems meant to be comically resolved in the final type-off between Rose and the American champion (Sara Haskell) but Louis still doesn’t appear to have got Marie out of his system.
Bérénice Bejo, who manages not to be arch with admirable ease, looks very beautiful and Roinsard may have realised the problem he’d got himself into with the Marie part of the story, even though he can’t extricate himself: when Marie listens in the small hours to the broadcast from New York, he makes an unsuccessful attempt to deglamorise Bejo by putting her in curlers, with no make-up. Romain Duris is happier expressing Louis’s unresolved feelings about Marie than pretending to be an antique romcom type: he has a good moment playing undecidedly with a knife. This raises hopes that you’ll get to see inside the character but you don’t. The result is that Louis (or Duris), most of the time, comes across as fickle and a bit ratty. Given the backstory and the competition from Bejo, it’s to Déborah François’s credit that Rose doesn’t end up seeming like a consolation prize for Louis. François is likeable and, against the odds, natural: she’s especially good when Rose gets angry with Louis – almost inevitably less effective when Rose is meant to be sweet and coy. There’s some very busy playing in many of the minor parts – in this category, Louis’s family are somewhat easier to take than the other applicants for the secretary job and a hypocritical hostel manager. An exception is Jeanne Cohendy, who’s subtle and incisive as Rose’s replacement as assistant in her father’s store.
10 June 2013
