Look at Me (Comme Une Image) [French Import] [Soundtrack]

"Look at Me" (Comme Une Image) is sophisticated, smart, witty, incisively written and a cogent look at New Millennium Celebrity and it's effects on family and friends.
As opposed to the USA, except for a few exceptions like Stephen King, in France Writers are revered and celebrated as much, and sometimes more, than Movie and TV stars.
Jean Pierre Bacri plays Etienne Cassard, a famous writer around whom several people revolve: his pretty but plump daughter forlornly named Lolita (Marilou Berry), his young trophy wife Karine (Virginie Desarnauts) and Sylvia and Pierre Miller (Agnes Jaoui and Laurent Grevill): Sylvia is Lolita's voice teacher and Pierre is an unsuccessful writer who lucks into a meeting with Cassard through the connection between his wife and her pupil.
Lolita is like her father in some ways, mostly negative, though: she rails at her friends and family in a bratty way and though she resents her father's wealth and social position she has no qualms about asking him for money or using his name as a way a garnering friendships. On the other hand she is shy, too self-conscious about her Ruebenesque figure and in one scene doesn't have the guts to demand access to a party given in her father's honor.
Lolita craves a boy named Matthieu, who openly flirts and even kisses other girls in front of her and yet, when she meets someone who actually likes her for herself, Sebastien, she has no idea how to deal with him.
Bacri's Etienne Cassard is a smug, opinionated, stuck on himself emotional thug: he wants all the love and admiration yet offers nothing in return but ridicule and a kind of feigned love. He is rude to waiters, to cab drivers: all of those people that he feels are beneath him in social status. His idea of parenting is to complain to his young wife, while they are weekending in the country: "Can't you keep that kid quiet...I came out here for some peace and quiet."
Marilou Berry plays Lolita like the ultimate victim but, like her father, she can be irritating and irritable: she cries, pouts and generally acts like a big spoiled brat. But Lolita has a heart and is capable of love, if not the wherewithal emotionally to recognize it when it is 12 inches from her face.
The emotional world of "Look at Me" is the world of the dysfunctional: both emotionally and socially. These people operate at the highest level...and because they are famous and influential,they are tolerated.
As directed and written by Agnes Jaoui and co-written by Bacri, "Look At Me" is about our obsession with the surface of things: if he/she is beautiful then he/she must be ok, happy, fulfilled. More to the point "LAM" is about how we've become obsessed with celebrity and how this pursuit of fame and fortune can obfuscate, alter forever and derange our lives and relationships.
"Look At Me" is ultimately then, an acidic look at the pursuit of fame, at the celebrity derived from fame and at the exorbitant price we must pay in human currency for it's fleeting, always ready to move on costly pleasures.

› Go to Amazon U.S. to see the review  5.0 out of 5 stars