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By Andrew O'Hehir

April 23, 1999 |This bittersweet and ultimately irresistible Parisian confection has an oddly displaced, almost timeless quality. At first I thought that directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau were being deliberately vague, or that perhaps the film was set in 1988 -- given its "this is pop" oversaturated palette, the summery pastels of Virginie Ledoyen's wardrobe and the Act-Up marchers in their black leather jackets. Making a musical comedy at all in the late '90s implies a commitment to fantasy and a kind of willful, old-fashioned eccentricity. But I think the real explanation is simpler: It's French. The rest of the capitalist world from Vancouver to Budapest may become a cheerful infoblur of cell phones, baggy jeans and overpriced pasta dishes, but France, for better or worse, will always be peculiar. And as it gingerly walks the line between weightlessness and gravity, between cloying and charming, "Jeanne and the Perfect Guy" is nothing if not peculiar.

Though it's not sung all the way through like "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg," "Jeanne" is an avowed attempt to bring the winsome, tragicomic sensibility of Jacques Demy's classic to bear on contemporary subject matter. Almond-eyed Mathieu Demy, son of the great director (and the equally important filmmaker Agnès Varda), even plays Olivier, the "perfect guy" who becomes our untamable heroine's first true passion. With her lovely, heart-shaped face, skin the color of eucalyptus honey and luminous smile, Ledoyen is a veritable angel of randy innocence. In the great tradition of French film ingénues, Jeanne splits the difference between feminism and misogyny -- she's an independent young woman fully in charge of her own sexuality, and she's the lithe, athletic nymphet of a million midlife-crisis fantasies.

As with any musical, your reaction to "Jeanne and the Perfect Guy" will largely depend on how well you tolerate the songs by composer Philippe Miller (with lyrics by Martineau, who also wrote the script). I was on the fence through the whole movie; Miller's attempts to introduce Afropop, Arabic music and other "exotic" influences -- as in a gratuitous liberal-guilt number sung by the black cleaning crew in Jeanne's office building -- are particularly embarrassing. When he stays closer to the sweet-and-sour French cabaret tradition, however, the results are often affecting and lovely. Early in the film, Jeanne's gay friend François (the lantern-jawed, wry-faced Jacques Bonnaffé) sings a haunting lament for his dead lover and his own pariah status as an AIDS widow. Jeanne doesn't pay much attention, but that song's spirit weaves through the film like a tiny, cold current of melancholy, finally erupting in her heartbreaking, almost Puccini-esque final duet with Olivier. (Most of the actors do their own singing, but Ledoyen is dubbed by Elise Caron.)

If you were pitching this movie to a Hollywood executive, you might tell him you were putting a hornier, less neurotic Ally McBeal in the cast of "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid" and sending them to Montmartre with songs by Jacques Brel. Jeanne is a working girl from lower-middle suburbia who spends her days answering the phone in the sterile, modernist lobby of a travel agency, and her nights and weekends auditioning candidates for le garçon formidable (a self-consciously outmoded phrase that might be better translated as "the wonderful fella"). She's bored by the upscale bistros her yuppie beau Jean-Baptiste (Frédéric Gorny) frequents -- though one of them provides the setting for a luscious, crimson-lit tango -- and the hunky, nameless messenger boy (Laurent Arcaro) is no more than a fuckbuddy. But when she accidentally sits on Olivier's lap on a Métro train, the chemistry is more than physical, as she tells her vicariously thrilled sister (Valérie Bonneton) in a giddy song-and-dance number amid the bland Formica of a cheap Chinese restaurant.

When Olivier tells Jeanne, well after their first sexual encounter, that he has a profoundly personal reason for attending Act-Up rallies, Ledoyen perfectly captures the incomprehension of a young person whose life allows no room for gravity or disaster. "That's OK -- we used a condom," she says blankly, trying to flee from understandable rage or grief back into carefree hedonism. As it gradually becomes clear that Olivier is much sicker than he lets on, Jeanne has to balance the unfamiliar idea of irreparable loss against her irrepressible appetite for life. To Ducastel and Martineau's credit, they stay true to the blend of sentimentality and cold realism that made Demy's films so distinctive. Jeanne wants to believe that love is forever, that Olivier is "the perfect guy" and that she can't live without him. What she learns is that, immeasurably painful though it may be, she can.

If the film's narrative structure is unnecessarily operatic -- both lovers confide in François, though he doesn't know they're a couple and neither realizes that the other knows him -- its camerawork and composition are memorably seductive. Full of long, fluid shots of Ledoyen rushing through the Parisian streets like a lascivious wood sprite perennially late for assignations, "Jeanne and the Perfect Guy" overflows with so much energy and emotion it'll win you over despite its flaws. The American version has reportedly been edited down to focus on the love affair, which may explain why all the characters except Jeanne, Olivier and François seem irrelevant. This is nonetheless a sad, delightful addition to the improbable '90s renaissance of French cinema -- a single glass of champagne, with an acrid absinthe chaser.
salon.com | April 23, 1999

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