Klapisch's students face the thirties

Cédric Klapisch’s Auberge Espagnole was a hit on both sides of the pond. Its effervescent multi-lingual picture of international student life in Barcelona went down easy but still contained some very human moments. Russian Dolls/Les poupées russes is the successful -- and in France equally popular -- follow-up, again featuring Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, Cécile de France, Kelly Reilly, et al. This sequel isn't deep, but it's warm, entertaining filmmaking with energy and style, taking its characters on a ride toward toward adulthood that runs from Paris and London to St. Petersburg.

Russian Dolls picks up Xavier (Duris) five years after his Erasmus year in Spain. A successful writer now, he's realized his childhood dream -- except that he's really just a well-paid hack, doing TV series and ghosting for celebs, a job the French call by the not very PC term nègre. But the new movie's pivot-point is the first one's most provocative character William (Kevin Bishop), the volatile brother of Wendy (Kelly Reilly). Oscillating between odious and cute, Bishop is an actor with a strong presence whose little riffs are irresistible but a bit troubling. He seemed a bigot in Barcelona, especially when he playfully suggested that the German roommate, Tobias (Barnaby Metschurat), must inevitably be a Nazi -- a joke Tobias didn't find one bit funny.

Russian Dolls gives William a chance to redeem himself when he falls in love with Natasha (Evguenya Obraztsova) a Russian ballet dancer touring England, and goes the extra mile to woo her, taking a year to learn fluent Russian before he looks her up in St. Petersburg. His romanticism, backed by a willingness to adopt his beloved's language and live according to her family's rules in a big collective apartment, trumps his former bigotry -- though when he gets to Paris to see Xavier William immediately shows he hasn't put away his little box of half crude, half droll national clichés. When he goes and looks up his ballet dancer, William’s suit is rewarded and at film's end there’s a full reunion of the Barcelona students for the Russian wedding finale -- with many amorous contretemps involving Xavier and Wendy along the way.

It was his appearance three months before Dolls as the lead in Jacques Audiard’s dark artistic thriller The Beat My Heart Skipped/De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté that finally won Romain Duris recognition as a serious actor and a César Best Actor nomination in France. But the charistmatic young actor remains most notably associated with two other directors: Tony Gatlif (three films) and Klapisch (five). Klapisch even compares his relationship with Duris to Truffaut's with Jean-Pierre Léaud. Two Klapisch-Duris combos didn't make it to the US, and in the successful 1996 When the Cat's Away/Chacun cherche son chat Romain's role was small; but the actor and director obviously click, and recently they've been very good for each other.

Klapisch got the inspiration for this sequel on his third visit to St. Petersburg, a city he had come to love. In a restaurant he saw a groom drunk in the men's room while his bride waited outside. And he thought of having William marry in Russia. Originally he hadn't wanted to do a sequel, declaring that the spontaneity of the original wouldn't be there. But this was before he fully realized how popular this ensemble was and learned that the original cast was willing. Now he's spoken of a third in ten years' time -- and in New York this spring he reduced the figure to five. This is something to wait for, because Klapisch and his actors actually do know very well how to keep the spontaneity.

While William finds true love, Wendy and Xavier have their own romantic whirlwinds -- which the plot contrives to have intersect. Wendy seems to pick boozy, unreliable men. Xavier’s still friendly with his former girlfriend, Martine – how could Klapisch banish Audrey Tautou? – but he shares Wendy’s unlucky-in-love status. Even Martine seems stuck with a round of serial partners -- a life now more worrying than fun: "Welcome to the thirties!" she declares. Xavier briefly dates a cute black girl, uses his lesbian ex-roommate Isabelle (Cécile de France) as a stand-in “fiancée” to meet his 98-year-old grandpa (Pierre Gérald), has a quick romance with would-be memoirist twenty-something super-model Celia (Lucy Gordon), whose glamour and beauty and fluency in French as well as English and fab pad overlooking the Seine all seduce him for a while. But then he homes in on Wendy (Kelly Reilly), that practical, down-to-earth girl who was in front of him all along, ever since she was the stabilizing force in the Barcelona auberge.

This transpires after the TV series Xavier is writing a sequel to is bought by the BBC and has to be switched to English. William pays a visit to Paris. Who should turn out to be a great scriptwriter, according to loyal brother William, but Wendy. Xavier is soon speeding back and forth on the Eurostar between Wendy’s place in London and Celia’s flat overlooking Notre Dame. Later he slips off to Moscow from St. Petersburg in the middle of the preparations for William’s marriage to Natasha. Locations change pretty fast -- and never stop being glamorous and colorful.

This is strictly movie land, and it would be a mistake to take any of Russian Dolls too seriously, but Klapisch, who had three years to ponder this sequel but likes to improvise his script from day to day during shooting, knows how to keep the ball rolling. His whirlwind round of warring and flirting and uniting couples is sort of like Gabriele (Last Kiss) Muccini’s operatic style, but with more international travel and fewer midlife crises. Paradoxically, though Muccini’s Italians are devastatingly superficial, Klapish’s motley crew can be even simpler. However, while Muccino’s men and women, boys and girls are almost nauseatingly full of themselves, Xavier has a wry awareness that his glam life as a ghostwriter is essentially shallow, and his pals share a similar degree of tart self-knowledge.

It’s felicitous that the final post-wedding sequence on a boat is one of the film’s most memorable. William and Wendy's parents fight, the old Barcelona roommates give teary little speeches, the German boy agrees to forget the Nazi slur, and William throws up and cries with joy. Klapisch has said this was a reunion for the young cast that was itself emotional and that contributed to giving this scene genuine feeling. If Klapisch winds up doing periodic sequels this may become a romantic fictional version of Michael Apted’s “—Up” series.

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