Parlez-moi de la pluie

Agnès Jaoui (2008)

Agathe Villanova is a feminist writer now running for political office.  With her boyfriend Antoine, she returns from Paris for a few days to her home town in the South of France, to help her sister Florence set their late mother’s affairs in order.  The family house is occupied by Florence and her husband, Stéphane.  The family’s Algerian housekeeper, Mimouna, who’s been with the Villlanovas for many years, lives in a kind of shack in the grounds of the house and, since funds are low, is now working for free.  Michel Ronsard is a freelance documentary film-maker and a friend (it’s not clear from when) of Mimouna’s son, Karim.  The two men want to make a film, as part of a series about successful women.  Agathe is the only successful woman they (through Karim) know.   Karim, who is married to Séverine, has a job at the reception desk of an unprepossessing local hotel (the Hotel Terminus), where he alternates shifts with a girl called Aurélie.  It’s summer but the weather has been dire and mostly stays that way throughout the film.

The Agnès Jaoui-Jean-Pierre Bacri partnership (they’re a married couple as well as a film-making duo) is admired for wry, unaggressive observation of human desires and frailties.  As well as directing here, Jaoui plays Agathe and, as usual, co-wrote the screenplay with Bacri, who plays Michel.  It might therefore seem harsh to accuse the Bacris of laziness, as well as complacency, but I think it’s right to do so.  The political dimension which supplies the framework for the story is hollow.  We understand that Agathe is at best ambivalent about a political career but her involvement in the campaign doesn’t seem to amount to more than the odd call on her cell phone and a brief outburst when she misses a big rally – because she’s agreed to a filming session with Michel and Karim, in the middle of nowhere, only an hour or so before the rally starts.   It’s hard to see that the incredibly minimal extent of her political activity is making any point.  I suspect that Jaoui and Bacri simply aren’t interested in writing more detail into this aspect of proceedings because they prefer to concentrate on the mildly comic interactions between the characters.  It makes no sense either that Agathe continues to give up and waste time on the comedy-of-errors documentary.  It’s not as if she’s portrayed as a woman who’s so vain or egocentric that any opportunity to be in the limelight is irresistible.   The documentary too is being used merely as a narrative convenience.

Although the storytelling is assured, the pacing is soporifically gentle – except when Jaoui occasionally injects a bit of relatively broad comedy to keep you awake.   Some of these sequences fit into the scheme of things easily enough – like the first session of filming and when Karim accompanies Aurélie to a friend’s baby’s christening:  Michel turns up for the occasion as the officially professional but actually inept photographer.  Other episodes are more artificial – for example, the pre-rally shooting session (Michel and Karim march Agathe to the top of a hill, the filming is abandoned due to a noisy flock of sheep, they march down the hill to find Michel’s car in a ditch, the rain pours, they try to flag down a car, they take shelter in a farmhouse etc etc).  It may be that Jaoui-Bacri fans will enjoy these interruptions to the usual tone and tempo as a witty convergence with the theme of characters jolted out of their civilised way of life.  They just looked a bit desperate to me.

What little there is of interest is at most implicit in the material and may even be inadvertent.   There’s a sequence in which Karim angrily (by the standards of this film anyway) complains to Agathe about the condescending racism which he and his mother are on the receiving end of – and which he says that Agathe’s family epitomises.   There’s nothing remarkable about the way this is developed in the film – nothing more than a vague sense that Agathe’s liberal conscience may be sensitive to this kind of criticism.  Jaoui and Bacri don’t use this element to give substance to the narrative (it could, for example, have been the reason that Agathe feels she should stick with the documentary project) or tension to the characters (Karim might have been presented as using this line because he knows it hits a nerve with Agathe).  What’s interesting is the film-makers’ relative distance from the Algerian characters (and in spite of the fact that Jaoui is of Tunisian descent).  If this isn’t condescension, it’s at least striking that Jaoui and Bacri seem less ready to present Karim and Mimouna – although they are very well played by, respectively, Jamel Debbouze and Mimouna Hadji – as having weaknesses, compared with the white middle-class characters.

Jaoui and Bacri have a knack for creating characters economically – a few quick strokes and they register – and for orchestrating incisive but relaxed performances from their cast.  It’s frustrating here that, once people have made their mark, there’s nowhere for them to go.   As in I’ve Loved You So Long, Frédéric Pierrot – here in the role of Agathe’s boyfriend – creates a strong, extremely likeable impression but is then wasted.   It wasn’t clear to me what line of work (if any?) Stéphane was in but Guillaume de Tonquedec has an amusing childish pedantry (especially in a moment when Antoine stops Stéphane’s child from choking and is then reprimanded by the latter for his life-saving method being technically incorrect).  Stéphane too then virtually disappears, as does Séverine.  As Florence, Pascale Arbillot, compared with most of the others here, seems to be working rather hard – but this could be an expression of the actress’s anxiety that her part is thin and she needs to make the most of it.  The outrageous egocentricity of the characters he plays is now Jean-Pierre Bacri’s trademark.  Although it’s becoming too familiar, I must admit that, by the end of this film, I was wondering if I would miss Bacri’s idiosyncrasies (the dry delivery, the infuriatingly raised eyebrows) if it was someone else in his roles – rather as Woody Allen could get tiresome but you felt the loss when his alter ego really was a different actor (like John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway).

Parlez-moi de la pluie is not a million miles away from non-vintage Woody Allen.  A group of skilful actors are evidently enjoying playing together, speaking moderately witty lines, as intelligent people, in mostly agreeable settings.   And, to be fair, this is non-vintage Jaoui-Bacri too:  Le goût des autres had a more robust eccentricity and Comme une image, although there were funny bits, was pretty bleak – certainly the unhappiness of the aspiring singer played by Marilou Berry mattered.  But Parlez-moi de la pluie is enervated; worse, it exudes an awareness on the Bacris’ part of the secret of their success.  It’s innocuous and rather self-satisfied about being innocuous.  The irony is that it’s quite powerfully annoying as a consequence.

16 November 2008