‘Look at Me’

The actors and the script strive to find the humanity and the humor behind their faults in Agnes Jaoui’s tightly wound drama.

By: Bob Brown
Look at Me, Jean-Pierre Bacri’s (left) bout with writer’s block upsets everybody around him, including his young wife (Virginie Desarnauts).>
   This French film is a gem. It honors what many studios have forgotten in their scramble for box office. It tells a story about real characters we can relate to. It’s the kind of humorous/serious movie Woody Allen would still like to make.
   The French title would literally be "Like an Image." But Look at Me comes just as close to what director Agnes Jaoui (The Taste of Others) was trying to show in her second directorial outing. "Not a day goes by when I’m not astonished to see how people accept how others speak to them," she told an interviewer, "treat them, squash them and mock them, when if they rebelled against it, they wouldn’t risk being sent to prison, or find themselves up against a firing squad."
   She’s talking about the daily indignities passively suffered by the powerless at the hands of the powerful: workers with an abusive boss, spouses with a belittling partner, children with a dismissive parent. With her own spouse, actor Jean-Pierre Bacri, the theater-trained Jaoui has created a tightly-wound drama that exposes the complicity of the bullied with the bullies. But she does so with empathy for her characters, and with humor. We can’t help, after all, being born into the skin of human nature.
   The story involves a series of closely interwoven relationships. All of them hang on a delicate balance between dependency and power. As the fulcrum shifts, so do the relationships. The central relationship is that of 19-year-old Lolita (Marilou Berry), a vocal student at a Paris music conservatoire, and her famous author/publisher father, Etienne (Bacri). Lolita is serious about her art. But she is self-conscious about her modest gifts and her ample girth. Furthermore, Etienne is so focused on his own celebrity and his writer’s block that he pays her little attention. She wants him to listen to her tape. He promises, then sets it aside.
   Almost anyone she meets seems to be using her just to get in good with her dad. She can’t tell who’s a real friend. The only one she trusts implicitly is her voice teacher, Sylvia (Jaoui), whom she turns to for scraps of encouragement. A big recital looms, and Lolita doesn’t know if she can pull off the Montiverdi. Sylvia, on the other hand, is too busy to schedule extra coaching for the musically challenged Lolita, until she discovers that the young woman is the daughter of Etienne, an author whom Sylvia worships from afar.
   That adoration upsets Sylvia’s husband, Pierre (Laurent Grevill), a writer himself, whose lack of success has frustrated him for years. But when his fortune changes with his latest book, Comme une Image, Pierre finds himself thrust into the company of Etienne and his circle and begins to develop some of the famous writer’s less admirable traits: self-centeredness and a careless disregard for his family and friends.
   To Etienne, meanwhile, writer’s block is like a persistent toothache. "I thought I had a great couple of lines," he says brightly, "then I realized I had used them in an earlier book." He’s grumpy and insulting. Everyone absorbs the abuse, including his beautiful young wife, Karine (Virginie Desarnauts), until there’s a breaking point. When everyone hops to his tune, Etienne is in control. But it’s clear he needs love from others. He just can’t recognize that his sarcasm will not earn it.
   Is Etienne’s self-centered universe irreversible. Will he ever recognize his daughter? Can Pierre escape the clutches of instant fame and be a real person again? The filmmakers avoid the trap of making these men emblems. Instead, the actors and the script strive to find the humanity, and the humor, behind their faults.
   Key to the plot, and to Lolita’s search for strength, is Sebastien (Keine Bouhiza), a young man whom she meets by accident. Bouhiza is making his feature-film debut here in a marvelously understated performance. He is a young man who needs to make his way. But he will not toady or bully to get it. Berry, too, is a fresh screen presence. Her Lolita spans the gamut of emotions from anger to despair to lust and to empathy. Idly twirling her raven tresses in her fingers, the actress conveys flirtatiousness, self-absorption and a childlike insecurity. It’s these little details that enliven the film. Lolita’s recital is a moving revelation of music’s power, even in the hands of dedicated amateurs, to connect, to embrace, to open channels in others.
   Jaoui’s passion for music and her vocal training are the film’s backbone — baroque, classical, hip-hop, the American songbook. "I love music so much that I lose my objectivity," she told an interviewer. She had selected too much at first. "Little by little I took it out. But I knew which music would go where. I also knew that I shouldn’t put in too much different music, because an uninformed ear would have been worn out."
   Much of the music is performed on camera by Canto Allegre, trained amateur singers with whom Jaoui has been performing recently. They are cast as Lolita’s recital ensemble. "One of the biggest challenges in the film," Jaoui admitted, "was trying to recreate the emotion one feels when one listens to live music."
   Unfortunately, most audience’s exposure to classical music today is in film scores. Professional orchestras and musicians struggle to make ends meet for lack of ticket sales. Perhaps films like this will send people to experience the thrill that Jaoui has tried to convey. She has done so about as successfully as any filmmaker could hope.
Rated PG-13. Contains brief language and a sexual reference. In French with English subtitles.