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I Do (2006)

Director: Eric Lartigau

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From Time Out London

This heavily contrived, undemanding and often funny mainstream Paris-set comedy-drama stars its co-scripter Alain Chabat as the 43-year-old middle-class perfumier – ‘your nose is the cornerstone of our company!’ proclaims his boss – who hires Charlotte Gainsbourg’s furniture restorer to fake an engagement to fend off the unwanted pressure from his formidable gaggle of sisters for him to marry. Classily directed – far more classy than it needs to be, as they say – Eric Lartigau’s film imagines his family as a kind of democratic National Assembly, dominated by the women’s party, who pass self-interested resolutions on the future of the family’s infantalised sole male. That Lartigau delivers some kind of emotional dividend as he outlines Chabat and Gainsbourg’s inevitable growing genuine affection for each other has much to do with Chabat’s silly comic skills and Gainsbourg’s nicely-judged performance, a foil that goes some way to spike some of the the complacency of the film’s subtextual sexual politics.

Author: Wally Hammond 2007-10-29 16:20:41

Time Out London Issue 1941: October 31-November 6