‘My Wife is an Actress’

Yvan Attal offers this light-as-air homage to the cult of filmmaking.   [R]

By: Elise Nakhnikian
   My Wife is an Actress is the latest in a recent spate of quirky character studies from France. Like Amelie, With a Friend Like Harry and The Closet, it hangs somewhere between screwball comedy and farce, as light as a fresh croissant.
   Too airy to support anything as weighty as a theme, although it flirts with the notions of sexual jealousy and marital conflict, My Wife is a light kiss blown to movies and the people who make them — especially its star, Charlotte Gainsbourg. From the opening credits, which run over lush black-and-white stills of glamorous stars of the ’30s and ’40s, it’s clear that writer/director/star Yvan Attal loves what his character calls the "cult" of filmmaking.

Terence Stamp (above) plays a self-centered actor in Yvan Attal’s My Wife is an Actress.

   But Attal’s character, a Parisian sportswriter also named Yvan, distrusts the world of the cinema and wishes his wife, Charlotte, a famous actress, would leave it. Yvan doesn’t like being left in the shadows or asked to take pictures when Charlotte is approached by her fans. He resents the perks that come with fame — even the ones he shares with his wife, like the empty table that materializes whenever she calls their favorite restaurant for a last-minute reservation. Most of all, he hates her love scenes.
   He’s mortified to watch his wife making love in a theater full of strangers, and he worries that simulating love and sex with her co-stars will lead to the real thing. How, he wonders, can she kiss a sexy costar and feel nothing?
   When Charlotte leaves for London to star with a legendary English leading man, it looks as if Yvan’s fear will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Zipping back and forth between Paris and London on the fast train to check up on his wife, he grows more harried and harrying, while Charlotte’s co-star John (Terence Stamp) closes in on his increasingly fascinated prey.
   Gainsbourg, who plays Charlotte, is Attal’s wife in real life, and it’s hard to know where the actress ends and the role begins. Like Gainsbourg, the movie’s Charlotte is wildly popular in France, makes movies in both French and English (My Wife is a mixture of subtitled French and English) and is married to Attal. That blurred identity gives viewers another reason to think about the question that plagues Yvan: Where’s the line between what we see on screen and the private lives and emotions of the actors who play the parts?
   The actress makes a convincing object of desire. With her liquid eyes and determined jaw, Gainsbourg looks both girlish and womanly. Attal portrays her as a magnetic mix of the two, alternately soulful and giddy, apparently always sincere. Gainsbourg is the scion of hip royalty (her father is a once-hot French filmmaker and composer, and her mother was a Mod icon in the ’60s) and she looks the part, acting utterly self-possessed, uninhibited and unconcerned about what anybody else may think.
   Yvan is likeable, too, but he’s a bit of a buffoon. Constantly mired in misunderstandings, he keeps making a fool of himself, fighting with strangers or trying to sneak past the doorman of an exclusive nightclub.
   Attal also pokes affectionate fun at moviemaking. Stamp is a treat to watch as a gorgeous narcissist spoiled by years of getting whatever and whoever he wants. Whether he’s pontificating about his painfully bad paintings ("I was trying to capture a childlike spontaneity"), starting to ask a lowly assistant on a date only to stalk off when she displays too much enthusiasm, or fixing his ice-blue eyes on Charlotte as he reels her in by reciting practiced lines of poetry, Stamp’s John is a perfectly self-contained universe. There’s also a sweetly absurd episode, early in the making of Charlotte and John’s movie, where everyone on the crew strips to put Charlotte at ease after she complains about not wanting to be nude in a sex scene.
   Back in the "real" world, there’s an unending fight between Yvan’s pregnant sister, Nathalie (Noémie Lvovsky), and her husband over whether to circumcise their son (she’s Jewish; he’s not). There’s no subtlety there, but the movie finds unexpected humor in the conflict.
   Credit for that is due partly to Lvovsky, who looks like a more amply upholstered Melanie Mayron (Thirtysomething’s Melissa) and exudes the same wry charm. But it’s mainly Attal’s bemused affection for his characters that animates the subplot — and turns this featherweight story into a pleasant diversion.
Rated R. Contains profanity, nudity and sexuality.