PARIS - A Parisian romcom draped in Hollywood attire, writer-director James Huths Happiness Never Comes Alone (Un bonheur narrive jamais seul) offers up oodles of energy, gloss and some of Motowns greatest hits within an otherwise conventional comedy about a romance surviving the test of angry husbands, jealous bros, bratty kids and the usual dose of Gallic sexism.
This Sophie Marceau summer vehicle should find lots of happy customers for Pathes wide-scale June 27 local release, with the actress star power pushing it abroad to Francophone territories and fests, though not quite across the Atlantic.
STORY: Universal Pictures International to Release Three French-Language Titles
Sacha (Gad Elmaleh) is a talented pianist who has never taken life too seriously, but things are about to change when 40-something career woman Charlotte (Marceau) literally plops into his life one rainy afternoon. After a quick bout of lovemaking, and yet another scene in which Charlotte nearly breaks her neckas if her appeal were meant to increase with respect to the number of times she gets clobbered on screenthings take a downward turn when Sacha discovers, oh la la, that his new squeeze has three kids, not to mention a jealous husband (Francois Berleand) who runs the multinational they both work for.
Even if Charlotte and her hubby are unofficially separated, she has a hard time untying the knotnot because she still loves her ex, but because hes just too rich and powerful. Meanwhile, Sacha manages to warm up to Charlottes children, only to realize that the whole family thing is getting in the way of his dream of composing a (rather cheesy) Broadway-style musical, which he hopes to bring to the stage with his best buddy, Laurent (Maurice Barthelemy), a theatre director who prefers boozing and babes over serious relationships.
STORY: CineEurope 2012: Juan Antonio Bayana Picks up International Director of The Year
Despite the extra-large serving of clichs, director Huth sugarcoats things enough so that the screenplay (co-written with regular collaborator Sonja Shillito) offers some pleasurable moments, many of them involving Elmaleh, a talented stand-up comic who can be a whole lot funnier than he is here. Still, he brings a certain burlesque charm to the proceedings, performing a few winning sight gags la Chaplinone of several nods to American movies on display here (the other ones being the movie posters for Casablanca and West Side Story that line the apartments of the two lovebirds, in a rather shallow form of homage).
Having showcased his stylistic chops in earlier, more intriguing genre works like Hell Phone and Brice de Nice, Huth adopts a rather conventional style here, with slick cinematography by Stephane Le Parc and a lushly generic score from Bruno Coulais (Coraline).
Marceaus dialed-in performance yields few laughs and plenty of hysterics, with tunes by Etta James, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye providing the emotional highs that the film fails to offer.
Opens: In France (June 27)
Production companies: Eskwad, Pathe, TF1 Films Production, Captian Films
Cast: Sophie Marceau, Gad Elmaleh, Maurice Barthelemy, Francois Berleand
Director: James Huth
Screenwriters: James Huth, Sonja Shillito
Producer: Richard Grandpierre
Executive producers: Frederic Doniguian, Sonja Shillito
Director of photography: Stephane Le Parc
Production designer: Pierre Queffelean
Music: Bruno Coulais
Costume designer: Olivier Beriot
Editor: Joelle Hache
Sales Agent: Pathe International
No rating, 109 minutes
0 comments:
Post a Comment