Film

Trop belle pour toi (1989)

Director: Bertrand Blier

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Bernard (Depardieu) is a wealthy businessman, happily married to beautiful, elegant Florence (Bouquet). Much to his astonishment, he falls in love with his comparatively dowdy secretary, Colette (Balasko). It's no office fling but the real thing, and - to Bernard - completely incomprehensible. Once again charting the outrageous repercussions of an obsessive love, Blier proceeds to explore the situation from every conceivable angle, merrily constructing and deconstructing alternative stories for all he's worth. Although the film fails to sustain itself over 90 minutes, much of the first half is very funny and occasionally sharp; Buñuelian motifs are mischievously resurrected, and Blier's parodies and fantasy sequences are brilliantly dovetailed in a series of waltzing, switchback camera movements that are a joy to behold. Blier is a classy, amusing film maker, but one suspects he is too fundamentally bourgeois to truly shock or surprise; and this movie ends dispiritingly with the most banal of all its potential options.

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