Director: Graham Guit
France/ French with subtitles
95 minutes
Gérard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant star in another in a long line of empty nest/midlife crisis movies that have come out in recent years as the baby boomers deal with these issues. Here,
we have a romantic comedy about a married Jewish couple living in Paris dealing with their relationship after their only son leaves home and gets engaged. The husband is content in his gynecological practice but the wife, who devoted herself to her family, suddenly finds herself at loose ends. In an effort to revive their marriage they take a trip to Israel, and on a whim the wife decides she wants them to move there and start over.
What was designed to be a story of two people trying new things and rekindling their relationship comes off as the story of a hen-pecked husband and a woman so self-absorbed in her own crisis she doesn't even see what he's going through. He indulges her every whim, causing them to move before their house or his new hospital job are secure, which leads to disaster. He stays in a hostel instead of a hotel because she wants to get the real feel of the city. She believes fully connecting to their religion and culture in a way they never did before will fill the whole in their lives.
But when a trained gynecologist ends up washing cars as the only job he can now get, and he agrees to get circumcised because she won't sleep with him until he does, you just lose interest. He comes off as a doormat, and she comes off as a, well you know the word. How can you root for a couple so out of touch with each other? Once you cease to care whether they stay together, you lose touch with the film. If they had just given him some crisis of his own, or fulfillment that he found, or goal besides pleasing her, it would've been a much better movie.
Lucy Cruell