Wednesday 18 April 2012

Delicacy

Delicacy is the latest "quirky" French film starring Audrey Tautou. She plays Nathalie, who we see in the opening 10 minutes meet, fall in love with and marry the love of her life, Francois. Then he's killed in a road accident whilst out jogging and Nathalie starts to lose her way. Unfortnately so does the film.

It starts with the heavy-handed voice-over at the funeral - "what if I freeze this moment and wall myself up in my grief". We're about to be shown her doing this for the next half an hour, we don't need her spelling it out for us. Then the film can't really decide what it wants to be. It's been marketed as a sort of rom-com and it has elements of that as Nathalie years later rediscovers love through the affections of the unlikely Marcus (Francois Damiens). And the film has moments of humour and moments where it tries to touch on the deep emotions involved both for Nathalie overcoming her grief and for Marcus overcoming his shy clumsiness. However, the moments when it successfully manages to merge these into a coherent film are few and far between.

The main problem seems to be with Damiens' character and how the film treats him. Damiens was the comic-relief sidekick to Romain Duris in Heartbreaker and was great at it. The problem is that the directors here seem to want him now to be both comic relief and romantic lead, which is a very difficult balance to find and they miss it by quite a margin  by going for a humour that is too broad and makes Marcus look too ridiculous for them to then be able to find pathos in the character when it is required. Part of the point of the film seems to be an encouragement to look deeper than the surface awkwardness and lack of looks, but that is kind of undermined when we are also asked to laugh repeatedly at just that awkwardness.

Still, the film has some good moments and Tautou is as watchable as ever, although we've seen her do this role many times before.

Overall - 5.5/10 It has some funny moments and some moments of feeling, but all too few moments when they combine successfully.
 

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