Au bout du conte (2013)
Directed by Agnès Jaoui

Film Review

Blind faith is the main target of the sharp wit of one of France's most successful screenwriting duos, Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, in their latest middle-brow comedy, Au bout de conte.  The end of the couple's long-term romantic relationship in 2012 appears not to have impaired their ability to work together, although their latest cinematic offering does have a slightly more cynical, tongue-in-cheek edge to it than much of their previous work.  A modern fairytale which gleefully plunders the child-oriented fantasies of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, Au bout du conte has great fun mocking those who choose to live in a rose-tinted universe, although it also puts up a pretty strong case in the defence of illusions.  Self-delusion is, after all, something to which we are all prone, and you could argue that without it life would be unbearable.

For her fourth feisty outing as a film director (and eighth screenwriting collaboration with Bacri) Agnès Jaoui assembles a first rate cast, headed by the supremely talented newcomer Agathe Bonitzer, a fairytale princess if ever there was one.  Another rising star, Arthur Dupont, is suitably cast as in the Prince Charming role, whose professional and romantic ambitions are threatened by a deliciously wicked Benjamin Biolay (boo, hiss).  With just a little irony, Jaoui casts herself as the neurotic fairy godmother and Bacri as a grumpy ogre obsessed with his mortality, and these two (as you might expect) get the lion's share of the laughs.  The fumbling lowkey Jaoui-Bacri romance (which is carried by a series of increasingly funny driving lesson sketches) has more than a faint echo of Jaoui's celebrated first feature Le Goût des autres (2000), although the film overall lacks the sparkle and ingenuity of this earlier film.

Jaoui admits that, in making Au bout de conte, she had in mind the form of the musical comedy and was inspired by Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, from which she takes the idea of several crisscrossing fairytales.  Cinematic references range from Jacques Demy's Peau d'âne to Cocteau's La Belle et la bête, although Jaoui does an effective respray job on her literary and filmic sources and you would never think she was trying to palm off second hand (stolen) goods onto an unsuspecting audience.  Whilst the film is a tad over-long and struggles to make a satisfying coherent whole, it is admirably redeemed by its abundance of waspish one-liners and laugh-out-loud comic situtations.  Au bout du conte is not Jaoui and Bacri's best work by any means, but it is an enjoyable romp which is all the better for its haphazard forays into deeper territory, which it does with the pleasing insouchiance of a newborn goat skipping playfully across a well-stocked minefield, albeit without the same predictably messy outcome.

Film Synopsis

20-something Laura has fallen in love with Sandro, an aspiring young musician, but their affair is threatened by Laura's overly attentive father Guillaume and the womanising impresario Maxime.  Meanwhile, Laura's aunt Marianne, a struggling actress, and Arthur's emotionally repressed father Pierre are coping with their own mid-life traumas.  An unlikely romance develops when Pierre offers to give Laura driving lessons...