_La Belle Personne_

[septimus_...@q.com]

They are all beautiful, the young teachers and younger highschool
students in this refreshingly chaste Christophe Honore offering. The
central subplot -- Louis Garrel's Italian teacher Nemours falling in
love
with the sensitive transfer student Junie (Lea Seydoux) is
sufficiently
controversial (it would in the U.S.) that Honore's lurid and sexually
explicit tendency would have been out of place. She keeps him at
arms-length all film long. Seydoux is not the most vivacious presence
but her character is an introvert, bursting into tears when an Italian
Opera is played in class. She does fine in the role. The entire film
is modelled after opera, with its somewhat farcial storyline that
everyone
involved treats with a life-or-death seriousness. Everyone gossips
about
and spies on everyone incessantly, and the secrets (e.g. homosexual
affair among students) never have a chance of staying hidden for long.
The film is very funny in parts, and like so many French films set in
schools, it has the students refreshingly interested in actually
learning
something from their classes, soaking up the culture. (In American
films they would all be posturing at being rebels.) Unlike in Abdel
Kechiche's _Games of Love and Chance_ though, the cast is
all-white (there may have been a minority or two in the background
somewhere). Perhaps one can make the excuse that the film is
not set in contemporary times (I actually don't know the time period
it is supposed to portray). It feels like an Eric Rohmer film that
never got made because Rohmer might have felt too disconnected
with modern French society. But that's a minor complaint. Even
the overused and increasinly tiresome Louis Garrel is wonderfully
warm,
winsome and funny here. A perfect companion piece to the equally
stylish and enigmatic French-Canadian film _Heartbeats_.