Film

Elisa (1994)

Director: Jean Becker

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

This vehicle for the gamine pop-star/actress Vanessa Paradis is by Jean Becker, a director who has done, and should know, better. Here, she prances her hot-panted way as an ex-children's home rebel who leaves her surrogate 'family' (Courau's fellow home-girl Solange, Sall's Arab sidekick Ahmed) to wreak emotional revenge for her mother's suicide on both her suburban grandparents and her 'real' father. The first half is a series of loosely linked scenes of posturing 'rebellion'. Older men figure strongly. She twists a late-middle-aged bookseller around her little finger, seduces an older man in the (mistaken) belief he may have been her mother's lover, and (at last!) tracks down her father, who turns out to be Depardieu. Thrown in, for good measure, is a bemusing scene with Léotard doing a Serge Gainsbourg impression at the piano as 'the Gitanes Smoker'. The final sequence is more diverting. She finds Depardieu brawling and boozing among the matelots in a port-side bistro, and strips for him on the sands before slowly realising that redemption is a game two must play.

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