MALIK ZIDI, LOU DOILLON, AND SAMUEL BENCHETRIT IN YOU, ME AND US

Him and him and her and the kid

Given that prolific filmmakers and former documentarian Jacques Doillon's best loved films going back to the Seventies, including Touched in the Head, The Hussy, Ponette, The Year 01, The Little Gangsterl, Un sac de billes, and Raja, all involve children, it's not surprising that a sprightly eight-year-old girl steals the show in You, Me and Us, whose French title is more of a hint of the sujbect mtter: Un enfant de toi "A Child by You." Were it not for little Olga Milshtein as a girl named Lina, You, Me and Us would be hard going. Well, actually it's hard going anyway, chiefly because the whole story becomes crystal clear in the first ten minutes. This happened with Doillon's more richly cast previous film, also a ronde, Marriage à trois which sported the presence of such thespians as Pascal Greggory, Julie Depardieu, Louis Garrel, and Louis-Do de Lencquesaing of Mia Hansen-Løve superb Father of My Children. Marriage à trois, though it too was tedious and self-indulgent, was at least sprightlier, more varied, more bouyantly theeatrical -- and 43 minutes shorter. This new one is too minimal. The writing isn't good enough to surmount the self-imposed limitations. And there's nothing minimal about the length, except the editing.

In You, Me, etc. an artistic type, Louis (Samuel Benshetrit) has recently been involved with a former student (Marilyne Fontaine), but we don't see much of her. Instead we spend out assigned nearly two and a half hours of encounters between Aya (Lou Doillon) and her two men, the present one, Victor (Malik Zidi), a dentist with a "belle bagnolle," a flashy car (a white Mercedes roadster) and her former husband and father of the child, Louis (Samuel Benshirit). Often all three are together,with Lina often hovering behind a door eavesdropping, but ready to leap into bed before she's caught

No sex, though, just lots of talking about relationships. Maybe that's why the Hollywood Repoarter critic, Jordan Mintzter, reviewing the film at its Rome debut, compareed You, Me and Us not very flatteringly with Éric Rohmer: Set in "semi-chic apartments and empty streets" in Tours, he explains, it consists of "a series of lengthy and theatrical tête-à-tête’s where the heavily written dialogues clearly take precedence over drama. It’s like an Eric Rohmer movie sans humor or structural inventiveness." Mintzer concludes that, as is true, we don't care much about the outcome. With Rohmer we always do, even when it's obvious. Usually in Rohmer someone, a young man or young woman, is faced with a series of choices for a mate, is drawn to the wrong ones, but comes right in the end. We don't observe anything like that happening here, because Louis and Victor seem equally wishy-washy, and Ala takes the whole 143 minutes deciding which of them she's going to go with, and whether her idea of having another child with Victor is something she wants or she should just go back to Louis as (spoiler alert!) she appears to be planning to do in those first ten minutes. She wavors back and forth so many times, I wasn't convinced by the end, on a wintry beach, that she had really made up her mind. I'd prefer to watch a short with just Lina, who is a fascinating and very French combination: she is at once preternaturally sophisticated and very much a child. To apply a simple adjective like "cute" to Lina would be a travesty.

As Victor, Malik Ziki, an actor who's usually intense, gives his ambiguous role as Ala's new partner some solidity, till the "lengthy and theatrical" (they certainly are that, from the first) dialogues begin to make whatever personality Victor has turn to jelly. I'm not usually troubled by the actors' physicality, but Lou Doillon has that fashion model boniness (like her more famous and more charismatic half-sister Charlotte Gainsbourg) but also hash buck teeth and big nose that make her seem more a fashion reject. Paired with Samuel Benshetrit, skinny and a bit wispy himself, they are a pretty unappealing couple. I was hoping Victor would shack up with Louis's current gf Marilyne Fontaine, and we could just forget about Lina's two skinny parents. No such luck.

The lack of Rohmeresque "structureal inventiveness" Mintzer refers to means that really nothing happens. Like a lot of talky plays there is jut a succession of scenes in slightly different venues. With tighter writing and actors with more intense presence and wit, the successive "reunions" of Ala and Louis at cafes, in hotel rooms, and so on could be suspenseful and sexy. They aren't. If everybody wasn't so damned post-modernly post-morality blah about what they want and what the other person deserves., there would be excitement and, probably, farce. Everybody does lie, it seems, including Lina, who's setting up a mock wedding of a couple of her schoolmates using a diamond ring nicked from her mother's drawer. The little bit of humor involved in this long, clever, but repetitious and ultimately numbing ronde comes from the way Lina pretends not to know what's going on, when like any properly Shakespearean child, she of course definitely does.

Un enfant de toi , 143 mins., (Three-Way Wedding was long enough at 100), opened in France after that Rome debut on Novemer 24, 2012, and reviews were not particularly good, Allociné press rating 2.9 from 19 reviews and an even worse public rating of a measly 1.8. Reviews acknowledged that this is a good-looking film. We note, without being too excited, that Benshirit is a "celebrity hipster" (director of Sundance prize winner I Always Wanted to Be a Gangster and actual ex-b.f. of Doillon fille)" (Minster again). I like Le Parisian: "Two hours and sixteen minutes of dithering drowned in palaver (...) are not a good moment in cinema." No, they're not. We don't seem to find Doillon at a "bon moment" right now, however the Cahiers people ma differ.

Screened for this review as part of the joint Unifrance-Film Society of Lincoln Center series, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (which runs in 2013 Feb. 28-March 10).

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