A la folie... pas du tout
Known in English as He loves me... he loves me not. Audrey Tautou goes from charming to creepy in this story of emotional obsession.
Angelique (played by Audrey Tautou) is a successful art student, who has just received a coveted scholarship and has a nicely-established life with good friends and a job waiting tables in a local bar. The only slight blemish on this idyllic picture is that the man she loves, Loic (played by Samuel le Bihan), a successful cardiologist, is married to someone else.
As the story progresses, we see her behaviour turn slightly obsessive, then get radically worse near the end, but enough gaps are left in the story for us to wonder if everything we suspect happened actually did happen. Then we return to the beginning of the story (in a rewinding scene a little reminiscent of Sliding Doors) and see the whole story from Loic's point of view. It is at this point that what seemed perhaps a little strange the first time around turns somewhat sinister.
The second time around, the story continues past the end of the first telling, to reach a reasonably predictable conclusion.
The easiest criticism of "A la folie... pas du tout", is that it fails to handle the suspense in a way that makes it sufficiently ominous to impress. My immediate reaction to that is to point to the fact that this is a French film, and thus one should not enter the movie expecting a Hollywood script. The telling centres more around the degradation in Angelique's sanity as she gets caught between reality and her perception of reality.
The French title works much better than the English one, given the rhyme it is borrowed from, and I can imagine the frustration of filmgoers who are used to the script exploiting opportunities for suspense or surprise to the maximum of their potential, as the understated nature of the storytelling consistently (and deliberately) underplays these chances, leaving more to nuance and feeling than one expects in a modern film.
I left the movie feeling that I had watched a film that was no great event, but which had nevertheless managed to balance a story that contained suspense and thriller-like anticipation with a dose of subtlety. Audrey Tatuou's face remains as caricatured as in Amelie, with her huge smile and expressive features, and I personally am quite impressed that the same French actress has been in two films that not only were big in France, but made it far enough over the borders that I was able to see them here in the US.
Links
Internet Movie Database Page for
A la folie... pas du tout
Rotten Tomatoes review summaries for the film
Official Website :
in French |
in English
The trailer from
1001ba.com (also on the official sites)
Posted by nlvp at February 25, 2003 01:01 AM