European Films

Italo-French actress Valeria Bruni Tedeschi plays an Italo-French actress in her second film Actrices (Actresses), which is part of the Un certain regard section here in Cannes, where it had initially been included with the French title Le rêve de la nuit d’avant. Much like her first directorial effort Il est plus facile pour un chameau (It Is Easier for a Camel…), Actrices is at least partially autobiographical, though this time around the dramatic comedy set in the rich, bourgeois and vaguely intellectual Parisian bubble of Bruni Tedeschi’s alter ego veers more towards comedy as the film progresses, earning good-hearted laughs as well as, well, whatever one may feel towards this particular milieu. French box office should be good, with excellent possibilities for arthouse play in non-francophone countries.

 

Like her good old self, Bruni Tedeschi’s character Marcelline is an actress of Italian extraction who grew up in France, nearing forty and without children. Not even a potential boyfriend seems on the horizon, and to make her feel better her gynaecologist tells her that not only her male hormone level is too high, but that she should also hurry up if she still wants to have children.

To both complicate her life further and to console her, Marcelline also sees dead people and even a fictional character, including her father (Maurice Garrel), her first lover and the incarnation of Natalya Petrovna (Valeria Golino), Turgenev’s woman in love with a younger man in A Month in the Country that Marcelline is rehearsing for a series of performances in a theatre in the Parisian suburbs.

It is during the rehearsals that Marcelline starts to look for a possible father of her future child. Candidates include the play’s tempestuous and possibly gay director David (Mathieu Amalric, from Rois et reine/Kings and Queen); the handsome young actor playing her on-stage lover (Louis Garrel, Maurice’s grandson) and several men not directly linked to the play, including a swimming pool supervisor (Arthur Igual) and Arthur (Laurent Grévill), a colleague and ex-lover. At one point, Marcelline even asks a priest (Pascal Bongard) if he can’t give her a child, since Christianity is “all about giving”.

Bruni Tedeschi again co-wrote the screenplay with Noémie Lvovsky (who here co-stars as the timid director’s assistant who would also like to be an actress) and she has grown as a filmmaker. Her scope is wider here, giving ample room to several characters besides her own, though the environment and several touches (the church visits, the sports sessions as a means of distraction, the opera on the soundtrack, the conversations with people who are not there) are still recognisably hers.

 

Her own mother also plays her mother again and they share the most hilarious sequence of Actrices, with Marcelline getting into bed with her mother because she cannot sleep and her mother seizing the moment to tell her what she really thinks of her daughter. Together with an impromptu birthday party to the tune of Gloria Gaynor’s I will survive and another scene involving a stray pie, the film’s latter half is clearly a comedy in the semi-neurotic bachelor tradition. The director-writer-star also properly sets up an audiovisual gag early on that makes the film go out with a bang.