Audrey Tautou in Pierre Salvadori's 2006 romantic comedy Priceless, you will warm to this sparkling film, which delivers a similarly complex web of deceit and misunderstandings as one little white lie compounds. With its atmospheric port town setting, a cleverly constructed script and appealing performances, this is a case of beautiful and tantalising lies, indeed.
The premise is set with eloquent precision, describing the secret passion that pathologically shy maintenance man Jean (Bouajila) harbours for hair salon owner Emilie Dandrieux (Tautou). He watches her adoringly from afar, daring only to put poetic prose to paper anonymously.
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Like the protagonist in Priceless, Jean is a dreamer who inadvertently becomes sucked into Emilie's well-meaning plan. The plan concerns her mother, Maddy (Baye), who has wanted to wallow in sadness (and track pants) since her sculptor husband left her for a younger woman. We rub our hands in glee when Emilie retypes Jean's flowery letter of longing, addressing it to Maddy in the hope it will rekindle her zest for living. However, expectations are raised but cannot be delivered.
Challenging the more traditional romantic comedy, Beautiful Lies slightly bends its well-trodden format. Darker in tone with a faintly melancholic (and perhaps incestuous) feel, its attempt to remove itself from the predictability of genre is thwarted partially by Salvadori’s ‘borrowing’ from Tautou’s success of Amelie, attempting to embody a similar aesthetic and character, with the short hair, eccentricity and quirkiness, yet stylistically, it feels too forced in places. In a recent interview with Tautou, she claims to prefer acting in French film, as opposed to Hollywood, because of the more unconventional roles available: “they propose me great characters in great movies, and it’s not easy to find very interesting female characters in the Hollywood film industry.” Perhaps. But Emilie’s character is too try-hard, with her hipster decor, general un-likability and at times, megalomaniac demeanour. In the opening scene, we see Emilie hacking of a client’s fringe, against her almost teary plea not to. It is a puzzle to why Jean adores her.
Regardless of the slightly darker elements not usually associated with the romantic comedies, including the strange issues of morality of sharing a man, this doesn’t refrain from the elements of predictability and blandness that meander throughout and require only a half-focused vegetation. Few moments are genuinely amusing; most tilt towards awkward titters. A very drunk Emilie, swigging from a bottle of vodka for inspiration as she attempts to continue the love letters, (albeit far less eloquently), is one of the limited humourous moments. Beautiful Lies isn’t so much of a comedy as it intended, but reduced a montage of awkward moments that are often wincingly painful to watch, particularly from gushing cougar Maddy. Although the film is well under two hours in length, it drags uncomfortably.
Despite the lacklustre elements, Beautiful Lies is slightly redeemed by excellent casting. Nathalie Baye portrays the desperate, overly zealous mother perfectly, as she hungrily falls for her daughters employee, whilst Stephanie Lagarde as Emilie’s salon partner Sylvia offer little handfuls of realist bolster preventing the Beautiful Lies from getting lost in the realms of disbelief.
Beautiful Lies is an average comedy sadly let down by its try-too-hard and slightly unbelievably script, yet fans of romantic comedy (particularly French) and Audrey Tautou won’t be let down too greatly.
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