IZIA HIGELIN AND CAROLE BOUQUET IN BAD GIRL

Giddy crises

In this feature debut by the actor-turned-director Patrick Mille (he played the young man in Corneau's swan song Love Crime, Rendez-Vous 2011]) , 25-year-old literarily inclined Louise (Izia Higelin) is suddenly hit with a double dose of life-altering reality when she almost simultaneously learns both that she’s pregnant and that her wild-living former model mother Alice (Carole Bouquet) has a recurrence of now advanced cancer. Justine Lévy has adapted her own novel and Mille, her husband, filmed the result. Bob Geldof and Arthur Dupont co-star.

Jacques Morice of Télérama noted that the film is "much less cruel than the book," "moderating the anguish and paralyzing guilt." Others say the book is much more personal and inward-looking; a lot may have been lost, despite the author's very direct complicity. One gets the feeling from the French reviews that most critics felt the film provides too little depth to its characters and doesn't make us care about them enough; it presents a narrative as if it is coming from a friend of a friend. This also was my impression. Sophie Grassin of TéléCinéObs thought (and I'd agree) the film is too facile in its use of flashbacks; they somehow seem too easy, almost irrelevant.

Several of the critics loved both actresses and found Bouquet, clad in striking bright hippie-ish outfits, brilliant and luminous as usual. And one does. Bouquet, seen most recently in the US in André Téchiné's Unforgivable , released Stateside last year, is a perennially classic French film actress who is fascinating to watch. Boyd von Hoeij of Variety points out that in Mauvaise fille Mille is adapting a work of autobiographical fiction by his real-life partner, Justine Levy, who in turn is the daughter of the superstar French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy ("BHL"), but that despite this inbred connectedness, "rather than feeling lived-in, the pic is a meandering muddle." As von Hoeij points out that in French the title means both "bad girl" and "bad daughter," a nuance lost for anglophone viewers.

A recent article in the New York Times, "It Takes a Family to Adopt a French Novel," by Kristin Hohenadel, explains more details of this film's gossipy background, which may e more interesting than the film itself. Justine Lévy was not known as anything other than the daughter of BHL until the publication of a 2004 autobiographical novel, Nothing Serious/Rien de grave. At that time she'd just been left by her husband of five years, Raphaël Enthoven, for Carla Bruni, his father's girlfriend and later wife of Sarkozy and hence to become "first lady" of France. Possibly the scandal element of a novel with a thinly veiled portrait of Carla Bruni in it was the main thing that drew attention to Justine Lévy's writing, but her next novel, Mauvise fille, in 2009, had sufficient literary merit to be nominated for a Prix Goncourt.

Bad Girl relies on flashbacks, sometimes rather random ones, to establish that Alice was a bixexual, irresponsible druggie and a terrible mother who forgot to pick up Louise at school and later was more like a pal than a mother; I'm not sure Carole Bouquet is the best choice for such a character, though she handles the present-day cancer-ridden mom with dignity and lightness. Bob Geldorf plays Louise's distant if loving rock star dad; in his scenes he speaks a little French and a little English in every sentence. Despite that fact that many will think this movie is worth seeing, if at all (French reviews not having been wildly enthusiastic), for Carole Bouquet, it was Izïa Higelin, who plays Louise, who was nominated for a Most Promising Young Actress (Meilleur Espoir Féminin) César award. And Higelin, though she may be hard to believe as a literary type -- she's meant to be an aspiring writer and a manuscript reader here -- is the one who pulls out all the stops, delivering tears and riotous laughter in nearly every scene. She's amply backed up in this by Arthur Dupont, as Louise's loving and sexy Spanish husband Pablo, a bullfighting enthusiast. A lengthy bullfighting sequence and another of what seems to be a baby shower that turns into an hysterical trip to the maternity ward (Louise screaming her refusal to give birth, even though she is quite evidently about to), are examples of how exaggerated and superfluous many of the scenes in this film are.

However well all this may work in the book, the film meanders, and many of the scenes seem both vague and overdrawn. So much so that without getting to know the characters, one begins to find them annoying. -- except for Bouquet: Dupont and Higelin overact and Geldorf is just walking through. In either case, experiences don't seem really felt. One begins focusing on peripheral elements, like the very French fact that even though of one of the two main characters is pregnant and the other is dying of cancer, hardly a single scene arrives without someone lighting a cigrette. This film make me think of Valérie Donzelli's 2011 Declaration of War, a much better film, also about cancer, and made, in an even more remarkable way, by the couple who actually lived the events. And also of Asayas' Clean, with its rock-star drug vicissitudes, which also feels in some ways false, but ultimately, in retrospect, winds up being a more interesting film than this one.

Bad Girl/Mauvaise fille 108mins., was screened for this review as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, the series presented from Feb. 28 to March 10, 2013 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Unifrance. Showings are Tues. Mar. 5, 7:00pm – IFC; Wed. Mar. 6, 9:00PM – WRT; Thur. Mar. 7, 6pm – WRT; with Patrick Mille appearing for the screenings.

French release was November 28, 2012. Allociné press rating: 3.1, based on only ten reviews. The film will be available on French DVD starting Wed., April 3, 2013.

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