LOLITA CHAMMAH AND ISABELLE HUPPERT IN COPACABANA

Downmarket Huppert

Fitoussi's second feature Copacabana sets its tone in the opening credits when a Brazilian song plays while the camera pans over a succession of ugly city house facades. It's Tourcoing, a town in northern France. This is where Elizabeth, AKA Babou (Isabelle Huppert) has wound up in her aimless life as a single mom who refuses to grow up. The music is her dream, while the facades are her reality. Her more serious daughter Esméralda (Huppert's real-life fille, Lolita Chammah) is finishing school and about to marry. Esmé is more than eager to settle down and escape Babou's self-indulgent wanderings from country to country. In opening scenes Babou misses a job interview, wears tastelessly youthful clothes and makeup, hangs out with a male her age whose love she rebuffs. Her near-caricature behavior at first makes you think, wow! because Huppert, the glamorous star, is so unlike her usual screen persona. But the film has little momentum at this point. Finally the action gets a push when she finds out Esmé does not want her at the wedding. Stung, and becoming a little more like a real person, Babou sets out to prove her reliability by taking a job selling beach-front apartment time-shares in Ostend, Belgium, and adventures follow. Most of the action from then on is set in Ostend.

Huppert is always interesting to watch, but her mere presence is really far stronger than this lightweight, initially sluggish little film, which winds up being a not-very-convincing feel-good comedy. Babou's flouting of society's stern rules, dramatically set off by the grim winter scenes of the gray and soulless Belgian resort and the harsh rules for entry-level time-share salespeople, eventually leads, after a brief period of outdoing her competition, to yet another failure. But her careless risk-taking after that is rewarded with surprising financial success, accompanied by acceptance, if wistful and temporary, by her daughter. Babou gets to attend Esmé's wedding after all -- and show off at it. What is Fitoussi trying to sell us? That there's still a warm place in French hearts for the "baba-cool," the aging hippie type? If so he might have delivered this message through more believable events.

Due to the generally strong acting various characters come to life, but still the thin action barely does. Partly this comes from the fact that Babou, whose point of view is central, takes nothing seriously. Huppert's usual elegant, ice-queen mode has been dropped. Babou isn't elegant. Her clothes are barely acceptable, her hair's a mess, and she's too busy scrambling to cover her mistakes to be haughty. The indifference remains. Success or failure, she keeps her wacky attitude and focus on the next fun time. But if she doesn't care, why should we?

Babou models a degree of cheek that might serve her well had she the ability to stick to any project. When she's set to the job of luring tourists to the time-shares office, she runs circles around her fiercest rival and unwilling roommate Irene (Chantal Banlier), a dumpy and mean-spirited lady with a solid background in real estate but no clue about soliciting on the street. Babou brings in lots of potential clients and wins the confidence of her cutthroat superior Lydie (Aure Atika of The Beat My Heart Skipped) and is promoted to regular salesperson at a much higher salary.

Babou's happy to have sex with a dock worker, Bart (Jurgen Delnae), whom she meets in a restaurant. But she's blatant about only wanting sex, and when he gets romantic she rebuffs that. Her indifference to his warmth as a person and her declaration that she is going to save for a move to Rio make him summarily dump her. Meanwhile she's letting a couple of young penniless drifters she finds on the beach sleep in one of the empty time-shares. When she guilelessly admits this while sharing one of their joints with Lydie, her upward march in holiday real estate is over.

The trouble is in the writing, not the acting, though Chammah hardly seems up to her mom's standard. The dry depiction of Babou's iffy Ostend career provides amusement, but there is no urgency about any of it. The ostensible central theme of reversed parent-child roles can't develop very well with Esmé and Babou most of the time located in different countries. And Fitoussi is fond of too-easy resolutions. Esmé comes to visit but is repelled when Babou has the two drifters join them at a fancy restaurant and fawns on them. Babou resolves this by making a quick trip to Tourcoing and immediately reconciling Esmé and her fiance after they've had a spat.

Copacabana deserves some credit for its knowing treatment of the borderline between blue collar and white. It shows different work situations and social levels non-judgmentally, and minor characters are believable and economically delineated. But wit and a sense of urgency are lacking.

Huppert's stubborn, steely, wrong-headed women are rarely appealing and never warm. But they inspire awe because of the elegance and panache she brings to them. Yes, she is French cinematic royalty. She has done sublime work for the likes of Tavernier, Chabrol, Haneke, Chéreau, Assayas, and Jacquot. But there are also examples to show she cannot save a bad movie -- or turn around a less-than-satisfying one like Claire Denis' recent White Material.

Such is the case with Copacabana, which is a new wrinkle but a gambit that doesn't quite pay off. The film's focus on marginality is timely, were there only a more realistic sense of the dangers of economic disaster, as in Xabia Molia's recent debut, 8 Times Up/Huit fois debout. But dare one say it? An actress who's warmer and less brittle might have given this role the three-dimensionality and humanity it needed.

Copacabana debuted at Cannes in May and opened theatrically in France July 7, 2010, receiving generally very enthusiastic reviews but with some strong dissenters. My sympathies are with the dissenters. Seen and reviewed as part of the French Cinema Now series of the San Francisco Film Society in Oct. 2010, where it was the Opening Night film, Oct. 28.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.