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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Charlotte Gainsbourg stars in a slight French charmer that asks the question: When she kisses that hot guy on-screen, is it for real?
Jul 12, 2002 | The French comedy "My Wife Is an Actress" deals with a very particular form of sexual jealousy, that of a sportswriter who can't stand watching his film-actress wife in her love scenes. The movie's art-imitates-life fillip is that the writer-director Yvan Attal stars as the sportswriter, whose name is Yvan, and Attal's real-life spouse, Charlotte Gainsbourg, plays his actress wife, whose name is, yes, Charlotte.
Attal manages to avoid any voyeuristic ickiness. There's never a sense that he's seriously airing his marriage's dirty laundry in public. But the picture, which is pleasant enough to watch, never goes into the subject in more than cursory fashion. At times it resembles one of those frothy French sex farces (like "Pardon Mon Affaire") that were so popular with American art-house audiences in the '70s. At other times it seems like Attal is trying for something like the comedy of male attitudes toward women that has long been Bertrand Blier's special province. The combination doesn't gel. What the picture lacks -- and what it sorely needs -- is Blier's mixture of daring and whimsy, the sort of thing that stays charming as it gets wilder and wilder.
It's too bad because it's a potentially great comic subject, a sex comedy that takes off from the question of how much of what we see in the movies is real. Early on, Yvan, who suffers through the fans and autograph seekers Charlotte attracts wherever they go (she's gracefully unfazed at the attention), meets a doctor who asks him how it feels to have a wife who sleeps around. To the doctor, Charlotte's love scenes are the same thing as being unfaithful. The guy's an ass, but when Yvan tries to tell him that Charlotte's sex scenes are no more real than a scene where an actor is gunned down, the doctor knows -- as we in the audience know -- that it's not a good answer. The fights for love and glory are staged. But a kiss is still a kiss.
Most of us have had dates ruined by a companion, to our immense annoyance, sighing lustfully over some gorgeous person up there on the screen. And Yvan has to watch his wife actually performing love scenes with those stars. (I have to admit finding that kind of thinking alien. If you don't want to enjoy looking at beautiful people, you shouldn't go to the movies.) When Yvan tries to question Charlotte, she tells him stories of having to canoodle with actors who emit sewer breath early in the morning. Well, he asks, what if she has to kiss Robert De Niro at 8 a.m.? In that case, she answers truthfully -- and not at all to her husband's liking -- she loves her job.
"My Wife Is an Actress"
Written and directed by Yvan Attal
Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Yvan Attal, Terence Stamp
Attal wants to use the particulars of Charlotte's job as a stand-in for the danger that sexual attraction to other people can pose to a marriage. It's a promising comic subject because there are so many people, men as well as women, who think marriage should mean never finding someone else attractive. It's promising as a movie satire as well. Who knows how many show-biz marriages have broken up because of what one spouse thinks is going on during a love scene? Just a few years back, the tabloids ran a story about the wife of a sitcom star getting her husband's co-star fired because she didn't like the chemistry they struck in their scenes.
Like that woman, Yvan is a big baby. He tells people that he's not bothered by Charlotte's love scenes because they're just part of her job. He's not very convincing. He pesters her about her attraction to her costars. He wants the truth and he doesn't want the truth. Yet he holds up the fact that he resists the advances of a shapely young thing in his office (who's attracted to him largely because he's got a famous wife) as proof of his sterling virtue.
