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Annabelle partagée (1990)

Director: Francesca Comencini

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From Time Out Film Guide

It's over almost before it has begun, but you can't help noticing the close-up of an erect penis in the first few seconds; nor, despite a timely pull of focus, its subsequent discharge. This is the first and last coup in what proves to be a tedious example of the French Art Film. Annabelle (Zingg) is a 25-year-old dance student living in Paris. The obtuse angle in an Eternal Triangle, she vacillates between two lovers, the youthful Luca (Adelin), and Richard (Marthouret), an architect her father's age. The writer-director approaches this tiresome situation from an oblique, feminine perspective, but there's no insight; the film is studiously humourless, explicitly unerotic, and alienatingly disengaged. When Annabelle complains that she feels colourless, one can only agree - Mlle Zingg doesn't live up to her billing. Surely it's only in (bad) art movies that people lounge around naked staring at empty spaces, assuring a lover ad nauseam that 'I want you to death'. Numbing intellectual masturbation.

Author: TCh 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide