Beautiful Lies (De Vrais Mensonges) (4/10)

December 2nd, 2011

Who doesn’t love Audrey Tautou? Amelie, the movie that shot her to stardom, seems to me to have been as much of a curse as it was a blessing to her. She’s now hopelessly typecast, which is a shame because she’s a much better and richer actress than the cutesy fixer-upper that first attracted us to her. Beautiful Lies, in which she’s rather miscast, does her no favours either.

I’ve been banging on for ages about the conformity of rom-coms, moaning every time I have to sit through one about how it’s all intrinsically the same story each time. Well, not here. I almost wish it was. Tautou plays Émilie (hmmm), owner of a hair salon and kookily attractive as usual. Jean (Sami Bouajila), a humble sweeper and odd-job man in her employ, is desperately in love with her but can’t tell her so. Instead, he writes her an anonymous love letter. She dismisses it as the ramblings of an OAP neighbour, perhaps, and thinks no more of it. That is, until her mother (Nathalie Baye, too good for this type of movie) shows up. She still yearns for her ex-husband, and sees her future as one long, thrill-less ride. An anonymous love letter, however, might change all that.

Émilie therefore deceives her mother into believing that a romantic stranger idolises her which, if you disregard the deception itself, causes the first half of Beautiful Lies to be rather funny. Jean turns out to be considerably smarter than your average hair-sweeper, a fact that comes out in a rather hilarious revelatory scene involving himself, Émilie, and two irate Chinese customers. Comic misunderstandings, the norm for rom-coms, come out in force. Émilie doesn’t know Jean is her admirer, Émilie’s mother thinks Jean is her admirer, and Jean plays piggy in the middle with a look of some bewilderment. It’s funny stuff.

And then it all goes horribly wrong for both the film’s participants and its watching audience. The deception I mentioned above is not the only one to occur, and each gets progressively nastier and nastier until you will come to realise that Beautiful Lies contains no attractive characters at all. Each ask things of others that defy belief and offend morals in a spectacularly unfunny final third that I just wanted to end as quickly as possible. Casting Tautou as Émilie was a gamble gone wrong. She’s so definable, at least to non-French audiences, as the wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly Amelie that we’re swept along, thinking that no, she couldn’t possibly be that shallow here. Her character needed to have been played by someone more duplicitous. The same can be said for poor Baye, who in fairness attacks her role with great gusto, raising it to slightly above the gutter where it rightly belongs. A two-minute happy ending, seemingly paper-clipped on to send the crowds home happy, fails in its mission, only adding to the cynicism that preceded it with a callous there-you-are-then.

Immensely watchable for its first half, Beautiful Lies disappears into a shallowness all of its own making. Interesting plotlines are introduced and abandoned (Jean’s illustrious past, for example), while the frankly unbelievable decisions continue to pile up. Never mind boy meets, loses and reunites with girl; how about boy meets girl, boy never gets girl, boy sleeps with girl’s mother for money? Hugh Grant and Colin Firth would never approve.