Une Femme de Ménage (The Housekeeper) | Review

Potentially great character study gets a tired story idea treatment.

Life is cruel at the most untimely of moments and for French filmmaker Claude Berri’s whose cinema has been considered a contemporary homage to the likes of Truffaut, this portrait that sees a Lolita text comes across like a speed-bump rather than a fine tuned discussion of humankinds ability for creating personal anxieties.

In Une Femme de Menagethe truly genial moment comes in the film’s conclusive sequence which sees our anti-hero middle-aged man come to terms or come to the realization that age and time has caught up with him and perhaps even changed him. The effects of loneliness can be unbearable; this is why humans who find themselves ‘alone’ tend to reach out for some sort of connection. In a traditional male fantasy narrative set-up, we watch the coming together of the aged man with grey and white with a youthful, eye full of bosom girl who listens to rap. Nor being neither a comedy nor a drama, the premise goes as follows: man places ad, girl answers ad, girl cleans house and listens to rap, girl sleeps with man. The acting is superb, Jean-Pierre Bacri is beautiful to watch, and you sense his frustrations and his verbal theatrics are of the authentic metropolic nature of cigarette-smoking Parisians. Mrs. Clean played by Emilie Dequenne, doesn’t stun like she did in her memorable performance in Rosetta, but she comes across as a young person just craving for attention. Romance ensues, some controversy-nothing too heavy or unpredictable, a couple of chickens get eaten and then the film’s conclusion plops out.

I would have preferred to have seen a film that challenged the male fantasy of the old male, he should have perhaps switched the roles around, have a woman realize that though see has got the career, she doesn’t have the prowess required to seduce or mentally reduce a modern Mr. Clean. If Berri truly wanted to discuss the whole getting old issue or the losing of the substance of being able to attract the young, then he could have vehicled this through his main character, its not by the him playing classical music over the booming sounds of rap or the noise of a vacuum cleaner do we truly get to walk in his shoes.

Stuck between becoming a comedy or a drama-the indecisiveness of the direction of this picture is problematic. I wasn’t sure how to read the picture, or what Berri was trying to tell us besides that he sucks to get old.Without some sort of transformation, or some sort of anything and the quarantined dialogue and lack of emotion it becomes a long dull ride till the end. The film’s final sequence is probably the most significant moment of the picture and most interesting comment about the character and the type of realization scary swim, but the rest of the premise is uninspiring and painfully empty which makes for a rather uninteresting character study.

Viewed in original French Language

Rating 1 stars