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April 24, 2005
OGIC: Look at Me
The turning point of Agnès Jaoui's film Look at Me (in French, Comme un image or "Like a picture") is easy to miss. It occurs in a split second while Jaoui's character Sylvia drives home from a party with Lolita, a young singer she's been coaching. Lolita isn't a professional, and Sylvia has been reluctant to give her time beyond what she spends with the group Lolita belongs to--they're talented amateurs preparing a concert together, and the implication is that Sylvia is a high-level professional coach who is doing them something of a favor. The work isn't truly interesting to her, but she feels it's a good cause, to a point. When Lolita presses her for individual practice time, Sylvia demurs--until she discovers that Lolita's father is Étienne Cassard, a famous author whom her literary husband, and apparently all of France, reveres. Introductions are made, and before you can say "the bees in their hive," the two women are on their way to a weekend in the country with Étienne, his young wife, Sylvia's husband, and sundry relations and hangers-on.The first evening, Lolita takes Sylvia along to a nearby party where she's going to meet up with her on-again, off-again boyfriend Matheiu. Mathieu dances with her, then sneaks off with a prettier, thinner girl. From a distance, Lolita sees them together, and the increasingly sympathetic Sylvia sees Lolita see them. Driving back to the house, Lolita vents about finding out Mathieu for just another in a long train of people who have used her to get to her father. Sylvia immediately recognizes herself in the description, and we see her see it in the briefest flicker of a shadow across her features. It comes as an unpleasant but--since she's decent--not an unwelcome revelation. They have become friends by now anyway, but Sylvia knows she only gave them the chance to because Lolita is Étienne's daughter. From here on out the friendship takes on another dimension.
In this interview, Jaoui discusses her film in terms of the kind of social power Étienne holds and wields ruthlessly. In various ways, the weaker characters in the film buckle under that power. The movie, by this light, is about how the stronger characters learn to resist. There's something flattening about this approach, though. It doesn't begin to suggest the degree of feeling in the film, most of it emanating from Marilou Berry's passionate Lolita. She can't get to her father's heart; the most he could be said to do is tolerate her. Her singing, which is very beautiful and at which she's ultimately triumphant, is a pursuit undertaken largely to impress and attract him, as well as to emulate him and his writing. But he just keeps ignoring her, with exceptions for those times when he needs love. He calls her "my big girl" and tries unconvincingly to pass it off as a term of endearment.
The story ends perfectly to my mind, with Sylvia instrumental in getting Lolita where she needs to be. The reluctant help Sylvia gives her with her singing in the first half is mirrored by the support she gives her as a friend and advocate in the second. My companion had quibbles with the ending, the kind of quibbles that start great conversations. And enough in the ending is left ambiguous or left to the imagination to make such post-film conversations not just possible but almost necessary. This useful ambiguity, as well as the way the action revolves around the uneven skill and progress with which various characters read the crisscrossing social dynamics at play (some, of course, never get it and never will), make the movie a very Jamesian affair. I loved it.
Posted April 24, 2005 4:09 AM
