Je pense à vous (2006)
Directed by Pascal Bonitzer

Film Review

To date, the acclaimed screenwriter and one-time film critic Pascal Bonitzer has found surprisingly little success as a director, despite a promising start with his first two features Encore (1996) and Rien sur Robert (1999). After the disappointing and frankly bizarre Petites coupures (2003) comes the even more lacklustre Je pense à vous, a pretty half-hearted attempt at a middle class comedy of manners that, through want of originality, quickly settles into a vacuous muddle that fails to coalesce into anything of any real substance.

Even though the film boasts an impressive cast (Edouard Baer, Géraldine Pailhas and Charles Berling make it a very tempting proposition and their performances are far from disappointing), it is singularly lacking in charm, conviction and narrative thrust.  The characters are little more than shallow bourgeois stereotypes, the jokes are tired (and sometimes repeated ad nauseum), and the situations so familiar that you can practically hear yourself reciting the dialogue before it's spoken.  Bonitzer is a supremely gifted screenwriter with a flair for observation and characterisation that other directors (Jacques Rivette, Raoul Ruiz, André Téchiné) have used to their advantage, but to date he has yet to make the same impact as a director. He would show much more directorial flair with his next film Le Grand alibi (2008) but he still has some way to go before he lives up to his promise as a filmmaker.

Film Synopsis

Parisian publisher Hermann is confronted with the mother of all dilemmas when one of his most successful authors, Worms, writes a book in which he describes, in intimate detail, a love affair that he once had with a woman named Diane.  Worms is too valuable a client to lose so Hermann knows he has no choice but to go ahead and publish the lurid novel, even though the Diane in question now lives with him and isn't likely to look kindly on the writer's graphic account of their steamy liaison.  Life is further complicated for Hermann when, one morning, who should re-enter his life but a former girlfriend of his, Anne.  The compromising portrait of Hermann in the embraces of another woman is captured on film by Worms, who duly sends it on to Diane.  The very night that Anne pays a house call on Hermann, Diane is visiting Antoine, who happens to be Anne's former doctor and present husband.  What starts out as a promising comedy soon risks turning into the grimmest of tragedies.  When he wants it, Eros can be a nasty little sadist...