FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL: Two upper-middle class bohemian Parisian couples throw caution and clothes to the wind and indulge in 90-odd minutes of carefree partner-swapping in the oddly titled Happy Few. Perpetuating the cliché that most modern Gauls are skinny, sexed-up chain smokers, Antony Cordier’s frank but feeble drama is the sort of film that people who never watch French films think all French films are like.
Rachel (Marina Fois), owner of a boutique jewellery store, has contracted web designer Vincent (Nicolas Duvauchelle, channelling a young Jean Reno) to launch her business site and the pair enjoy some gentle flirting on their first meeting. Rachel invites him and his partner, French-American beauty and ex-Olympic gymnast Teri (Elodie Bouchez), to a meal with her husband, Franck (Roschdy Zem), a lithe feng shui advocate. A few stolen kisses and knowing glances later, a rule-free, consequence-be-damned wife-swap has taken place, with fleshy, full-frontal dalliances happening around every corner.
Cordier, who co-wrote the minimalist script with Julie Peyr, keeps his four protagonists at a distance. Each one a striking physical specimen – all gaunt, angular, taut bodies and strong, lean profiles despite a lifestyle that appears fuelled by wine and rich food – the members of Cordier’s lustful quartet float above their own lives (once their fun starts, work, friends and children are all bothersome and perfunctory concerns) and, subsequently, exist in a rarified space beyond viewer empathy as well.
Marina Fois’ Rachel is the closest Cordier gets to a fully-realised human being. Older than Teri, she is initially drawn to the woman who so enlivens her husband (eventually, they share a maudlin lesbian encounter in a rustic country house), then begins to feel the unravelling and blurring of what is most important to her. Vincent plays rough with Rachel (in some of the film’s most graphic scenes) and when she tries to initiate the same with Franck, the results are embarrassing and awkward.
There are definite comparisons to be made with Cordier’s more accomplished debut film Cold Showers (2005), which also explored the interplay and morality of the sensually adventurous. In that film, the themes were personified by wayward teens, whose naivety and unburdened lives made for far more believable central characters than the upwardly-mobile professionals in Happy Few. That said, Cordier’s strengths have not diminished in the long break between projects; there is a lovely artistry to his framing and use of natural light sources and he commands an effortlessly naturalistic tone in the performances. (Fois and Bouchez are afforded more acute introspection than the surly Duvauchelle and just-happy-to-be-here Zem.)
Coverage from the film’s Venice Film Festival screening in September 2010 suggested European audiences found a great deal to laugh at in the film; that Happy Few is, in fact, a caustic black comedy that ridicules the pretensions of modern French people who aspire to a decadent lifestyle while maintaining their middle-class conservatism. Such subtleties, should they exist, were lost on this reviewer; barring some unintentional laughs stemming from the depiction of a foursome in a flour mill, Happy Few struck me as being about people who were incapable of being happy at all.
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