Writer-director Marc Fotoussi’s Copacabana starts off like an unpromising Euro sitcom. The characters seem to fit the 'movie-types’ that hipper-than-thou film bloggers like to mark out as pop-culture chew-dolls, mostly because they are so boring and limited (and therefore potentially offensive). Here, there’s a happy-to-be-uncool twenty-something Esmeralda (Lolita Chammah), only daughter to wacky anti-bourgeois single mum Babou (Isabelle Huppert), whose way of rebelling is to scorn her mother’s New Agey, free-spirit persona. Early in the film Esmeralda announces she wants to marry salesman Justin (Joachim Lombard), a prospect that horrifies Babou. Worse, Esmeralda doesn’t even want Mum to be at the wedding, because, well, she’s "embarrassing."
Shot in grim, flat tones that’s more in keeping with the style of the so-called 'mumble-core’ indie genre, Copacabana is actually very smart and very funny in a brittle kind of way. Fitoussi seems to have deliberately set up both the situation and the characters as a challenge; as the film plays out, and as the narrative action gets into twists and turns, the true nature of the characters begin to emerge. Central to the film’s conceit is the idea of identity; characters present a fixed idea of themselves to each other (and the world), but under pressure their true natures emerge.
Babou, playing the 'adolescent’ in her relationship with Esmeralda, goes off and gets a gig selling dodgy real estate (time-share apartments) in a miserable looking Belgium resort in order to prove she’s a responsible human being. It turns out she’s a quick and sure hand at sales; but she can’t help but push her luck. She takes in a couple of drifters (she lets them sleep in un-let apartments); and she begins a casual affair with a local, Bart (Jurgen Delonat).
Once upon a time, actually the mid-to-late '70s, Huppert was a poster girl for Euro chic cinema; with her button nose, freckled face and nervous energy, she was often cast as the sexy, but enigmatic girl-child. Here, she’s perfectly cast as a woman who not only can’t 'grow up’ (at least in the conventional way) but doesn’t see any need to; Babou is curious, volatile and though out, refuses good sense to get in the way of her true nature. Of course, this kind of outlook comes with a price and much of the movie’s humour derives from Babou besting characters who act out of duty, or practical necessity, and lose a bit of themselves in the process.
