Look at Me [DVD]

Trust the French to get under the skin of appearances,at which they are so good.The husband and wife(Jeanne-pierre and Agnes Bactri) both write,act in and (she)direct this film set in the bourgoise artistic milieu centred on Lolita,a desperately unhappy girl.Lolita is worried about being overweight and unattractive,despite her singing talent.Her low self esteem comes from her self-centred father,an egotistical but successful writer(Eteienne). Lolita feels people want to get to know her for the wrong reasons,especially when they find out who her father is. Lolita's singing teacher,Sylvia is an important character and she is unhappy herself.Her husband is an aspiring writer too.These two groups find an intersection in Lolita as the two writers connect which leads to success and publishing offers.The unfolding nature of many relationships reaches subtlety through the way it is so easy to misinterpret the intentions of others or the way they respond to the wrong aspects,also the way we exploit other people for our own ends.Image(comme une image)vs reality done with such great humour.

The French seem to have the knack of making good films about human relationships and motives which the Anglo-Saxons don't quite match. Here the central character is an overweight young woman who is the daughter of a famous writer. From her radiate three threads - there is her friend, Sebastien (he has changed his name from a Muslim one: it helps him to get on better, he says); then there is Sylvia (Agnès Jaqui - who also directs and co-wrote the screen play) who is teaching Lolita to sing. She is married to a talented but whinging writer, Pierre, who has been well reviewed but not been taken up by the large bookshops as yet. Some of the scenes between these two could have been taken straight out of Till Death do us Part with younger actors. Finally, Lolita's father, Étienne Cassard played by the famous French actor, Jean-Pierre Bacri. He divorced Lolita's mother years ago and is married to a beautiful and kindly younger woman, Karine.

Lolita is attending singing lessons with Sylvia and we first see Lolita's problems resulting from her lack of self-esteem. She sees herself as ugly because of her obesity (in fact, she is quite pretty). This leads her to reject friendly approaches from people and her views, in her eyes, are confirmed. However, there is truth in what she thinks. Sylvia, when she learns that Lolita's father is the famous writer, someone Sylvia much admires, agrees to do a teaching session about which she was previously doubtful. Sebastien later appears to hang around because Cassard offers to help him with employment.

Lolita (the name is surely a sardonic joke by the writers) tells Sebastien that she is a 'zero'. No one likes her for herself, no one loves her though that is not really correct. Karine, and later Sylvia are sympathetic as is Sebastien but she rejects any evidence that people might care for her and hurts them in return. At the root of this is her father, an emotionally buttoned up man who keeps relationships at bay with sarcasm and jokes directed at others. He looks completely flummoxed when Karine tries to tell him how badly he treats her. Lolita gives him a tape of her singing, hoping he might take some interest in what she is doing but he leaves it unopened.

On a more general level, the film explores how people judge others on their appearance. Good looking people tend to get better jobs, earn more and have more friends. No solutions are offered but perhaps some might think more about how they approach obese people. The more Darwinian among us tend to say it is all their own fault, forgetting that their own sylph- like figures were probably not achieved by relentless self-denial - they are just that way.

The film builds up to a satisfying climax. Along the way we hear some beautiful choral music, in particular a gorgeous piece by Monteverdi. The acting is flawless and the whole thing has an organic seamlessness about it. Agnès Jaqui is an accomplished actor (Sylvia)with a delightfully expressive face but her direction and writing must make her a major figure in French and world cinema.

There is an essential self-reflexive theme running through this film: art may enrich society, but does it enrich the artist? Literary fiction may aspire to an understanding of the human condition, but does the novelist really understand people? Comparisons have been made between director Agnes Jaoui and Woody Allen, and you can see some parallels in the level of philosophical, aesthetic, and sociological enquiry which underpins the action.

Crucially, however, you are often left wondering who is the star of the film. Lolita is a pretty (or plain) young woman who is conscious that she is overweight and who is struggling to build a career as a singer. Her father is a successful novelist who seems to have devoted most of his life to ignoring her. Lolita (and there's an obvious pun in the name), craves his attention, his respect, his love. She wants to be noticed. But she is noticed only when people identify her as the daughter of the great man.

"Look at Me" ('Comme une Image' - like a picture, like an image), however, finds its narrative dynamism in the tale of two novelists - the one famous but racked by an inability to find further inspiration, the other initially struggling then catapulted into the limelight through his wife's use of Lolita's influence. Neither appears able to understand the people around him. Or are they just blinded by success, so blinded they become self-obsessed and unable to see beyond than their own fame, their own image?

Lolita's father devotes more attention to his phone than he does to her. She becomes an artefact, a series of events in his life to be patronised from time to time. He can see the talent in another writer, but is unaware that his own daughter might have talent of her own. He is rude, overbearing, self-centred, and a dried husk of the creative writer he used to be. He shares something with his daughter - fear. He worries he might never write another word, she worries about her forthcoming performance.

The film moves at slow pace - very elegantly, very stylishly. The performances are faultless - and the 'making of extra' which accompanies the DVD emphasises just how much effort went into getting things right. It's a very accomplished, very engaging, and ultimately very rewarding film, but don't let comparisons with Woody Allen lull you into expecting a comedy. Agnes Jaoui delivers a film which is less a comedy of middle class mores and more a dissection of the sociology of art. Not a film which will be to everyone's taste, but sophisticated, charming, and absorbing.