Change of Plans Review
I don't know anything about the Parisian bourgeoisie that I didn't learn from movies. Generally speaking, they are largely blase and discontented with their home lives, but they seem to be really enthusiastic about one or two things. Like tango classes and goat cheese, and extramarital sex, and... yeah, that's about it.
The movie cuts between two nights, exactly a year apart, in which high-powered lawyer M.L. (Viard) and her unemployed husband half-heartedly throw a dinner party for their friends, mostly bored upper-class French couples with jobs in medicine and the movie industry. A cancer specialist and his wife, a gyno. A carpenter who had an affair with M.L.
The token wild card, M.L.'s tango teacher, who wears ethnic "Funky Earrings!" and makes points about "culture!" basically serves as an asexual plot device. She's the only one who doesn't bed-hop in this movie. Weirdly, considering the plot's such an old-school partner-swappin' French farce, we don't get a single sex scene. Laaaame.
Anyway, men meet other men's wives, sparks fly, there are illicit kisses and exotic cheeses served with grapes and discussions of mortality and everyone gives each other f*ck-me eyes across the table. It's all terribly French.
I especially liked Emmanuelle Seigner (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), who played a high-powered lawyer's extremely bright, but repressed wife.
A few melodramatic subplots involving the dinner party guests (one of them gets cancer, another becomes a paraplegic) verge on the absurd, but mostly I was into it. Except the lack of sex scenes. But the cheese made up for it.
Sum...ology: Bed-hopping Parisian upper-crust. Woot.
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