LAINE MÄGI AND JEANNE MOREAU IN A LADY IN PARIS

Another chance to admire Jeanne Moreau

In A Lady in Paris/Une estonienne à Paris, Anne leaves Estonia and comes to Paris to take care of Frida, an old Estonian lady who has lived there for many years. On arrival Anne realizes she isn't wanted. Frida tries every possible means of driving her away. She wants nothing from life but the attention of Stéphane, her former young lover. Anne resists in her own way. Through contact with Anne, Frida rediscovers her quality of eternal seductress. So goes the festival blurb.

The Estonian director Ilmar Raag is inspired by the fact that her own mother once went to Paris for a time to take care of a very rich woman and returned transformed afterwards. This is a generally good-looking, well-acted, but hopelessly slight effort. Compare Hou Hsiau-hsien's Dorsay-sponsored foray into Paris, Flight of the Red Balloon (NYFF 2007), which was charming and precise and memorable. Raag ain't no Hou.

After viewing A Lady in Paris at a May 20, 2012 Cannes special screening Boyd von Hoeij of Variety summed it up this way: "A mousy, middle-aged caretaker travels from the Baltics to the City of Light to look after a serious piece of work in A Lady in Paris, from Estonian filmmaker Ilmar Raag (The Class). Jeanne Moreau aces the role of a prickly, elderly Estonian who doesn't want anyone to look after her in her adopted home country, much less a woman from her long-abandoned place of birth, but the wafer-thin story offers too little beyond an enjoyable reminder of the actress's talent. Older auds might appreciate the film's familiarity and elegant intimacy." I completely concur with von Hoeij's description. Indeed white-haired American arthouse customers who remember Jeanne Moreau's glory days in the Sixties would probably enjoy roaming yet another posh, cosy Parisian flat and savoring the aging diva's eternal elegance and edge. Even in bed she looks stylish. But there is nothing much here, for a variety of reasons.

First of all, the "mousy" caretaker. As von Hoeij also says, there is an unnecessary opening reel set in a snowy Estonian village where this lady deals with a drunken boyfriend and a declining mother whom she's caring for, and who then dies, freeing her up for the Paris job. All that could have been better dealt with in five minutes, given that it does not build insight into or sympathy for Anne (Laine Mägi) -- and such sympathy does not develop later. What emerges is that while Frida (Moreau), who conveniently refuses to speak a word of Estonian, rejects everybody but Stéphane (Patrick Pineau), she comes to realize that Anne can be helpful and may relieve her solitude. Anne cares enough to contact the Estonian community through a church and get some of its older members who know Friday from singing together in a choir decades before. Their visit to Frida is a disaster and only awakens old resentments on both sides, but later Frida may realize this was a kind gesture on Anne's part no one else would have been capable of.

Second, the haughty Frida too, despite her brilliant interpreter, is underdeveloped, supplied with a curiously vague backstory. She came to Paris very young. How or why we do not know. She has had many lovers, but what else she has done we also do not know. Are the lovers the reason why she is rich, and lives in this "grand appartement bourgeois"? One little story about a letter from an Estonian sibling who only asked for money and mentioned her mother's death as an afterthought explains in only a fragmentary way her negative relations with her homeland. But otherwise she is an cipher, if an impressive one, being embodied by Jeanne Moreau.

Finally, there isn't much of a point of view. The "mousy" Anne hasn't got much of one. Frida offers only feistiness, and possible suicidality. The director has aid that she was warned by her French collaborators to avoid focusing on the cliché sights, that they are not the real Paris. And yet that is just what she does. Every time Anne gets a chance she oggles the Arc de Triomphe or the Eiffel Tower or the Seine by night. Abut the only real Paris we get is the inside of Frida's real apartment and the inside of Stéphane's real café.

What happens is that after deciding to take this job, Anne is picked up at the Paris airport by Stéphane and driven to her nominal employer (he's actually responsible), where he tells her nothing but not to let Frida have the key to her medicine cabinet and that she can be "a little direct." Immediately it turns out Frida is a hellion who is politely brutal with Anne and does nothing but tell her to leave. Anne makes a little progress, learning to buy croissants for breakfast at a bakery and not a supermarket, and not to try serving Estonian food. The medicine cabinet remains an issue, and sometimes Frida refuses to get out of her posh bed. Finally Anne is about to give up, but something happens, which we could hardly have helped predicting from the start. If her morning tea were this thin Frida would throw it on the floor.

All of this is not to say Raag lacks skill as a filmmaker. Things move along with a steady rhythm. The camerawork is assured, sometimes handsome but not distractingly so. And he does not waste his glamorous veteran. As von Hoeij says, "Though Moreau doesn't show up until 20 minutes in, she looks luminous and steals every scene she's in, seeming to savor each line on her tongue before spitting it out with evident relish." And we enjoy that. Apparently Raag's debut film was a fast-paced crime thriller as well as a work of social criticism. In approaching this very different material the 44-year-old Raag, who has also been a media executive, chooses to works with taste and restraint, but has pushed the light touch a little too far, leading to blandness.

Une estonienne à Paris, 94 mins., had its French theatrical release came on Dec. 26, 2012. Allociné press rating: 3.1 (from 20 reviews). Everyone admired the acting and the cinematography but wished for a sharper point of view. Screened for this review as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2013 (Feb. 28-Mar. 10) at Lincoln Center, presented in collaboration with UniFrance.

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