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Novo (2002)

Director: Jean-Pierre Limousin

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From Time Out London

You know you’re in for a rough ride as soon as the awkward, ‘quirky’ jump-cuts kick in at the start of this risible, self-conscious French ‘meditation’ on love and memory. All fears are confirmed in the next breath when the film’s focus, Graham (Eduardo Noriega), a taciturn Spanish photocopier operator, is seduced in front of security cameras (Ooh! Surveillance! Scary!) by his boss in a stark Parisian office born of no other reality than that created by filmmakers looking to depict ‘alienating’ modern business environments. It gets worse… We soon realise that poor Graham is a few sausages short of a barbecue: he has amnesia and relies on a notepad (and sometimes marker-pen scribbles on women’s chests) to remember exactly who he is. Somehow this mental deficiency allows Graham a wild sex life: the pretty office temp, Irene (Anna Mouglalis) strikes up a relationship with this good-looking human goldfish that involves lots of sex, travelling on trains and shaving each other’s butts.Graham is a feeble concoction: a clichéd idiot savant who, despite not being able to remember his own shoe size, is a whizz at both mental arithmetic and going down. When the sex dried up halfway through the film – giving in to sub-‘Memento’ revelations of who the hell Graham is and why he can’t remember anything (questions that are not sufficiently answered) – so did my patience. Never before have I been left so bereft at the sudden withdrawal of cunnilingus-by-proxy.

Author: DC 2005-07-04 12:10:54

Time Out London Issue 1820: July 6-13 2005