The promise that stage actress-turned director Isabelle Mergault showed
in her first film Je vous trouve très beau
(2005) is conspicuous by its absence in her follow-up feature, a modern
day reworking of The Merry Widow.
Mergault's mise-en-scène is as uninspired and rudderless as her
writing, so what we have is a tedious attempt at a comedy of manners
that is swamped in cliché and contrivance, with characters so
dull and superficial that you would hardly notice if they were replaced
en masse with cardboard cutouts. It does not help that the film
has something of a crisis of identity. It starts out as a
light-hearted comedy, stuffed with jokes of unimaginable crassness, and
then suddenly goes all serious for no apparent reason. Just
what persuaded actors of the calibre of Michèle Laroque and
Jacques Gamblin to participate in this fiasco is a mystery but their
combined efforts go someway to salvaging a pretty dismal film.
The above content is owned by frenchfilms.org and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
Anne-Marie has just lost her husband in a car accident, but she is far
from being the grieving widow. She has been having an affair with
another man for the last two years and now, finally, she can marry
him. Or so she thinks. The one thing she hadn't banked on
was the tidal wave of good will from her family. To help her get
through her grief, the whole family turns up to stay with her.
Now Anne-Marie finds that she is even more of a prisoner than when she
was married...
Franz Kafka's letters to his fiancée Felice Bauer not only reveal a soul in torment; they also give us a harrowing self-portrait of a man appalled by his own existence.
Continental Films, quality cinema under the Nazi Occupation
At the time of the Nazi Occupation of France during WWII, the German-run company Continental produced some of the finest films made in France in the 1940s.