Quand J'Etait Chanteur (October 1, 2007)

I saw a preview for this in March and thought it looked interesting. It came out in Montreal last summer, but was only playing at Ex-Centris without English subtitles, and my French definitely isn’t good enough to see it without English. Then, when I got to Dublin, it was playing at the IFI. The premise: A never quite successful lounge singer and a young real estate agent with her own issues have some kind of relationship, physical or otherwise. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what a movie plot is from the preview.

Question: Was Gerard Depardieu actually ever sexy? As a 300-pound blob with an enormous bulgy nose, 3 chins, bad fashion sense, a man purse (not bag, little purse) and sandy blond dyed hair, we’re expected to believe that not only was he a wannabe Tom Jones, but that he has enough charm and looks to sleep with someone who looks like she just stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad. True, she was drunk. And true, she ran away right after. But, really, how much suspension of disbelief is there supposed to be here – enough so that that he could get her into a room and naked of her own volition? Yeah, right. Nobody’s THAT desperate.

Then, Gerard Depardieu is all like “Hey, you know what would be awesome? If I force her to hang out with me under the pretence that I am looking for a house. THAT’S the way to win her affection.” What follows is an ambivalent story about two people eventually developing a friendship that could be something more, but isn’t. Old habits die hard, life gets in the way, etc etc etc. The real estate agent has a child who is either autistic or retarded, issues with her own motherhood, a volatile ex-relationship with the baby’s father, and about 8 feet of emotional wall built up around her.

The whole romantic friendship idea is pretty interesting to me, especially after an offhand comment by Dan Savage in one of his columns. His point was that extremely close platonic friendships often take the place of romantic ones until one of the friends finds a romantic partner. He was referring specifically to fag hags, but it’s a similar kind of un-relationship dynamic as there was here. With the sex away and done with in the first 10 minutes of the movie and no real desire to repeat it on the part of the real estate agent (can you blame her?) all pretence is out of the way and you get to what really makes these two people tick.

Or, rather, you would if any effort was made to elucidate where these characters were coming from. The way things were ultimately presented, it was easy to see what you wanted to see and disregard points that would have contradicted however it was you saw these characters. And above all else, even with friendship, the walls remained extremely high. If something was starting to become more open, or starting to change, someone would pull back into their comfort zone and everything was back at square one. And maybe that was the point.

Maybe it’s because Gerard Depardieu is so damn funny looking.

Am I glad I saw it? Meh.