ON SCREEN: French Twist
eye WEEKLY
eye WEEKLY February 15 1996
Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday
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ON SCREEN ON SCREEN
FRENCH TWIST
Starring Victoria Abril, Josiane Balasko and Alain Chabat. Written
and directed by Josiane Balasko. French with subtitles. (AA)
Opens Feb. 16.
(eee of 5 eyes)
by
Gemma Files
French Twist, the new comedy from French writer/director/actor Josiane
Balasko -- which ran at last year's Toronto International Film
Festival under the untranslatable title Gazon Maudit, and recently
selected as France's official entry for this year's Best Foreign
Language Oscar -- is, fittingly enough, a wildly varying little piece
of fluff. An odd blend of whimsy, message-laden sentimentality and
outright farce, French Twist slides at a second's notice from amiable
silliness to string-yankin' freakery.
Our heroine, Loli (the insanely sexy Victoria Abril, star of
Almodovar's Tie Me up! Tie Me Down!) is an expatriate Spaniard stuck
in an unsatisfying marriage to French real estate agent Laurent (Alain
Chabat), who spends most of his waking hours hopping into bed with
every woman he comes across. ("No thanks," this prince among men tells
a guy who tries to sell one of his extracurricular "dates" some roses,
"we've already fucked.")
When tough-but-tender butch lesbian Marijo (Balasko herself)'s truck
breaks down near Loli's door, however, this arrangement begins to
changeE drastically. Even before Loli finds out Laurent's been
cheating on her with half the South of France, she and Marijo have
started smoking cigars together, dancing together, and playing footsie
under the table at a local Spanish restaurant; Mr. Heterosex Machine
Laurent, meanwhile, responds to this assault on his "happy home" with
wild jealousy, guilt and desperation.
By the halfway mark, our three protagonists have settled into a
deceptively idyllic menage that has Loli sleeping three days a week
with Laurent, three days with Marijo, then resting on the seventh.
Jealousy, however, rears its ugly head -- and not just from Laurent's
direction.
As both writer and director of French Twist, Balasko's style is
breezy, slang- inflected and studiedly insubstantial -- at one point,
Loli and Marijo hold a long, flirtatious discussion about the various
colloquial terms for "rabbit" and "vagina" in French, Spanish and
Quebecois. But her characters are never less than likeable, and she
definitely knows how to cast.
So remember this, going in: It ain't brain surgery, folks. Just some
good, clean, dirty French fun.
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