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Un couple parfait
2005 Drama
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Summary
After fifteen years of harmonious married life in Lisbon, Marie and
Nicolas are on the point of separating. Whilst attending a
wedding in Paris, they decide to break the news to their friends...
Review
Here is the kind of ponderous film
d’auteur that lives down to many people’s worst prejudices of
French cinema. The director, Nobuhiro Suwa, may be Japanese not
French, but his film reeks of the kind of navel-gazing posturing and
self-absorbed artifice which has given French cinema a bad reputation
amongst international audiences. By asking his actors to
improvise dialogue and by using minimalist camerawork (mainly static
long- and mid-shots), Suwa is presumably hoping to capture a sense
of realism and truth that could not be obtained via a more conventional
approach. The technique has been used very successfully in the
past - notably by director Jean-Luc Godard - but here the end-result is
a film that feels vacuous and aimless, giving nothing for the audience
to latch on to. Even with such hugely talented lead
actors as Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Bruno Todeschini, the film fails
to come alive and watching it through from start to finish is nothing
less than a gruesome ordeal, not to be wished on anyone who has something that
remotely approximates to a life.
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