The Stroller Strategy | Review

What to Expect When You’re Expecting to Expect It: Michele’s Debut Arrives Stillborn

Times are tough for the rom-com and Hollywood isn’t the only old geezer that’s forgotten how to treat a lady. Mainstream schlock in the Gallic realm is nothing new, but a host of recent B, C, and D grade features keep churning our way, all potential prototypes for possible Kate Hudson carbon copies. Currently at the top of the heap is actor turned director Clement Michel’s debut, The Stroller Strategy, a blindly constructed sham that gender reverses something like Bachelor Mother (1939) and perambulates nowhere in particular. Combining the usual base hetero rom-com ingredients together, Michel never gets beyond simple sugar.

Within five minutes of running time, Thomas Platz (Raphael Personnaz) has met Marie Deville (Charlotte Le Bon) at her birthday party in silent slo-mo. Without taking a breath, we see them move in together, search for new apartments, and discuss parenthood, all filmed in a montage of clips as they walk up different circular staircases. And before the credits are finished, there Marie is, breaking up with Thomas on her birthday because he’s a freelance artist and isn’t ready for fatherhood. Fast forward yet another year, and Thomas is still stuck on Marie. His best friend, Paul (Jerome Commandeur) insists that pretending to have a child is the best way to nab women. And like the prophetic detail this was meant to be, a baby literally falls on Thomas as he ascends the staircase to his bachelor pad one day.

His neighbor, in the throes of some vague medical ailment while being escorted to the hospital, accidentally drops her kid on him, and thus, while she convalesces, he is tasked with taking care of the stranger’s baby. Immediately, he’s pretending the baby is his own, and he sets off to reclaim the finicky Marie, simultaneously landing a new gig with the persnickety head of a design studio (Francois Berleand), who, you guessed it, grants Thomas the job because he’s also a newly minted father. Of course, the very much impressed Marie is in for a rude awakening as the baby’s mother doesn’t take very long to wake up from her induced coma, all set to reclaim her baby.

In the slapdash intro, Marie woefully eyes her oblivious boyfriend and says, “We’re not going anywhere,” which also sums up the film’s narrative trajectory. The heteronormative subconscious is evident in full force here (as blatant here as another recent woefully gross piece of merde, Pascal Chaumeil’s Fly Me to the Moon), and if not for some very minor vulgarities, The Stroller Strategy feels like 1950s propaganda.

Charlotte Le Bon is as simperingly doe-eyed as they come (thankfully she’s a bit better in Michel Gondry’s latest, Mood Indigo), and the only detail we ever learn about her Marie is that she just wants a baby. The film is really about daffy dudes who really want to be dads, but just aren’t aware of it until they get to bond with a baby. The steadily working Personnaz (who many should recognize from Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina), while not wholly unwarranted as a romantic lead, unfortunately is saddled with playing a simpleton here. And it’s anyone’s guess why Francois Berleand chose to be involved. Louis-Paul Desanges (who shares screenwriting credit with Michel), proves to be as inept with romance as he is with zombie apocalypses (Mutants, 2009).

On top of the The Stroller Strategy’s pedestrian appearance, even its titular motif takes a doofy backseat, with supporting character Paul relegated to a stupefying montage of teaching his bud how to walk convincingly with a stroller, revealing its own hook as nothing more than a dubious cover for its insistent portrayal of procreation syndrome.