L'Ex-femme de ma vie (2004)
Directed by Josiane Balasko

Film Review

It's hard to imagine that the director of the classic French comedy Gazon maudit could be responsible for this limping excursion into wastelands of mediocrity.   Josiane Balasko is someone who is greatly respected in France for her work as director, screenwriter and actress, but here she touches her creative nadir.  L'Ex-femme de ma vie is a film with absolutely no redeeming features.

It's not hard to account for the film's failure.  Killer number one is the script, which combines the most excruciatingly contrived plot with the most implausible, two-dimensional set of unsympathetic characters, none of who seems capable of speaking or acting in a way that an inhabitant of the planet Earth would recognise as normal, even in a cheap farce.

Then, as if that wasn't enough punishment for an unsuspecting cinema audience, we have Thierry Lhermitte and Karin Viard going head-to-head for the highly coveted Worst Actor of the Year award, with Josiane Balasko struggling to enter the fray but failing (just).  These are the kind of Grade D performances you'd expect to see in some trashy low budget Australian soap opera, not in a fairly high-profile French film.  No matter how much one admires Josiane Balasko, you can't help but think that this film was a terrible mistake...

Film Synopsis

Tom Steiner is a prolific writer who has published numerous pulp fiction novels under several pseudonyms.  He is about to get married to Ariane, a press attaché who believes that one day he will be a great writer.  In a restaurant one evening, Tom is enjoying a quiet meal with his fiancée when who should show up but his ex-wife Nina.  It has been seven years since Tom and Nina last saw each other, in the throes of a bitter divorce.  Now it seems Nina is desperate for her former husband's help, homeless and penniless after being abandoned by the man who has managed to get her pregnant.  Just when everything was going so well for him, Tom finds he has no choice but to come to the rescue of the woman who was once the great love of his life, before it all turned sour...