Rien sur Robert
France 1998
Reviewed by Chris Darke
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Paris, the present. Didier Temple, a critic, is smarting after having been exposed for denouncing a Serbian film without seeing it. His girlfriend Juliette turns up at his office and tells him she has lost her job. Didier is convinced he's being followed by a young man whom he spots in the street. Later, Juliette meets a television director and tells Didier she intends to sleep with him.
Didier is invited by a friend to a dinner party given by the Chatwick-Wests. When Didier arrives at the party, his hostess is nonplussed by his presence. His host Ariel Chatwick-West then mocks Didier in front of the guests, one of whom is Jérôme Sauveur, the man Didier thinks has been following him. Humiliated, Didier tries to escape from the house and discovers a young woman, Aurélie, hiding in an upstairs room. She attempts to seduce him.
The following day, Juliette tell Didier of her sexual escapades with the television director. When he pursues her, Didier is knocked down by a car. On leaving hospital, Didier visits Aurélie. They have sex and she reveals that she has attempted suicide. Didier and Aurélie take off to Italy but break off their journey to stay at a hotel overlooking the French Alps. Juliette calls Didier to tell him she's coming to meet him.
It transpires that Sauveur and his girlfriend are staying at the same hotel and that Aurélie and he were formerly lovers. Aurélie collapses in pain and is taken away for treatment. She returns to the hotel; Sauveur breaks in on her and Didier, who is wielding a pistol. Aurélie and Juliette travel back to Paris together. Back in Paris, Didier calls on Aurélie but leaves her when she has another attack. Summoned to hospital, Didier learns that Aurélie has again attempted suicide. Didier visits Aurélie again to admit that he doesn't love her. On leaving, he discovers that Juliette is leaving for Italy with Sauveur.
Review
In director Pascal Bonitzer's exquisitely cruel comedy Rien sur Robert the main character is a critic, Didier Temple, who savages a Serbian film without having taken the trouble to see it. A former editor of French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, Bonitzer is presumably drawing less from personal experience here than from an incident when French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut fulminated against Emir Kusturica's 1995 Underground in the pages of Le Monde before having seen the film. Bonitzer takes this act of critical bad faith as the jumping-off point for a scabrous and unsettling little comedy about intellectual manners, social humiliation and vying belles lettristes.
Casting Fabrice Luchini as Didier was an inspired decision; a master at suggesting blank-faced malice and passive aggression, Luchini's association with French costume drama, Beaumarchais l'insolent, in particular, suits him ideally to the role. For all the modern Parisian paraphernalia of elegant monographs, mobile phones and brainy bed-hopping, there's a sense in which Bonitzer's combination of erudition and eroticised intrigue is still grounded in a vision of the Parisian intellectual élite as a venomous court. So we have the faux pas-committing courtier in Didier, the handsome young arriviste man-of-letters in Jérôme Sauveur, and the ogreish seigneur in Ariel Chatwick-West (played by Michel Piccoli). Chatwick-West's terrifying dinner-party humiliation of Didier alone makes the film worth seeing, if only for the relish with which Chatwick-West devours and spits out Didier's overweening self-regard.
In calling on the twin influences of Freud and surrealism, Bonitzer succeeds in making Rien sur Robert more than just a satire on the insular world of the French literati. There's a deliberate splitting of characters: Didier and Sauveur, for example, function as two halves of the same sociological composite, the French intellectual. Juliette and Aurélie are also equal and opposite mirror-images of Parisian femininity: Juliette, bemused, foul-mouthed and always attracted by the wrong man, is an utterly contemporary character. Aurélie, whom Didier discovers concealed in an upstairs room in the Chatwick-West home, is the mad woman in the attic.
That the relationship which develops between Aurélie and Didier quickly turns problematic for both of them is an implicit critique of a particular French intellectual tradition which glorifies madness as romantically attractive. It's through the figure of Aurélie and in Didier's relationship with her that the film focuses on issues of responsibility and selfishness, gradually developing its light-hearted comic tone into something altogether more tragic.
Credits
- Director
- Pascal Bonitzer
- Producers
- Jean-Michel Rey
- Philippe Liègeois
- Screenplay/Dialogue
- Pascal Bonitzer
- Director of Photography
- Christophe Pollock
- Editor
- Suzanne Koch
- Art Director
- Emmanuel de Chauvigny
- ©Rezo Films/Assise Production/France 3 Cinéma
- Production Companies
- Rezo Films presents
- a co-production of Rezo Films/Assise Production/France 2 Cinéma with the participation of Canal+/sofica Sofinergie 4/Sofinergie 5/Centre National de la Cinématographie
- Executive Producer
- Catherine Chouridis
- Production Manager
- Catherine Chouridis
- Unit Production Manager
- Didier Carrel
- Unit Manager
- Carmen Lima
- Location Managers
- Thomas Pitre
- Stéphane Cressend
- Post-production Supervisor
- Eve Albertini
- Assistant Directors
- Philippe Tourret
- Céline Cuvellier
- Script Supervisor
- Lydie Mahias
- Casting
- Antoinette Boulat
- Set Decorator
- Françoise Doré
- Costume Designer
- Khadija Zeggai
- Costumes
- Marie-José Escolar
- Wardrobe
- Nathalie Suhard
- Make-up
- Michelle Constantinides
- Odile Fourquin
- Hairdressers
- Catherine Crassac
- Sarah Guetta
- René Sebaoon
- Titles
- Arane
- Music Consultant
- Nicolas Saada
- Soundtrack
- "Ray of Light" by/performed by Leon Parker; "Alone" by
- H. Levy, performed by The Don Ellis Orchestra; "Open Beauty" by Don Ellis, performed by The Don Ellis Orchestra; "Valse" by/performed by Antonio Carlos Jobim; "La Derelitta" by Bruno Fontaine, Pascal Bonitzer, performed by Patricia Dinev
- Studio Recordist
- Olivier Do Huu
- Sound
- Frédéric Ullmann
- Mixer
- Jean-Pierre Laforce
- Post-synchronisation
- Marion Lorthioir
- Sound Editor
- Gérard Hardy
- Sound Effects
- Pascal Chauvin
- Cast
- Fabrice Luchini
- Didier Temple
- Sandrine Kiberlain
- Juliette Sauvage
- Valentina Cervi
- Aurélie Coquille
- Michel Piccoli
- Lord Ariel Chatwick-West
- Bernadette Lafont
- Madame Sauvage
- Laurent Lucas
- Jérôme Sauveur
- Denis Podalydès
- Martin
- Nathalie Boutefeu
- Violaine Rachat
- Micheline Boudet
- Madame Temple
- Edouard Baer
- Alain de Xantras
- Violeta Sanchez
- Ariane Morgenstern
- Wilfred BenaÏche
- Igor
- Marilu Marini
- Ana, Aurélie's mother
- Alexis Nitzer
- Monsieur Temple
- Dimitri Rataud
- Arthur Temple
- Patricia Dinev
- singer
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Millennium Film Distributors
- 9,596 feet
- 106 minutes 37 seconds
- Dolby
- In Colour
- Subtitles