JOSEPH BOUR AND ANGÉLIQUE LITZENBERGER IN PARTY GIRL A wayward woman's attempt at catharsis and rehabilitationParty Girl is a strange film and a hard one to judge since in it one of the three La Femis film school directors, Samuel Theis, uses his mother and his three siblings Mario, Severine and Cynthia, playing themeselves, and reenacting thing that happened. His mother, Angélique (Angélique Litzenburger) is a sixtyish cabaret "hostess" inhabiting a big strip bar on the edge between France and Germany far beyond her expiry date, but still loving to smoke, drink too much, dress up in sexy outfits, and flirt for drinks and tips. She lives in a little room above the bar, and her friends are the other girls and barmaids. The film depicts how she decides to marry a favorite customer of several years, Michel (Joseph Bour), who has retired from his mining job, and now is sick of going to the cabaret. He asks Angélique to marry him. She agrees. But the decision to settle down and give up the honkey tonk life does not sit well with her, though marriage includes a loving reunion of her children, including a now 16-year old daughter, who has been in foster care and not seen for a decade.
The directors are skillful at staging events and wrangling large numbers of people at the wedding and in various club scenes. In stark contrast are the few intimate and awkward scenes between Michel and Angélique.
These scenes are both realistic and, perhaps, cathartic. DP Julien Poupard's cinematography is handsome. However the laborious recreation or approximation of earlier actual events does not work so well as a film. The elements and where they are going to lead -- Angélique's addiction to the cabaret life; her tendency to drink too much and be a mean drunk; her lack of a physical attraction to Michel -- are all too obvious from the start to deliver any sense of development. The film meanders, but goes nowhere unexpected. The protagonist is vivid, but lacks depth or appeal. The directors achieve a kind of gritty, specific realism in which the principals, especially Angélique, are perfectly cooperative and adept at playing themselves, but despite a special berth at Cannes for this film, it merely seems a novelty item, lacking the resonance of true cinema.
Party Girl, 96 mins., the directors' Marie Amachoukeli-Barsacq, Claire Burger & Samuel Theis' first feature, debuted at Cannes as the opener at Un Certain Regard, receiving two awards, including the Camera d’Or. French release 27 August 2014, to good reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.6); Metacritic rating 69. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC/uniFrance-sponsored Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at the Walter Reade Theater and the IFC Center in New York in March 2015, its US premiere.
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