Nathalie

Synopsis: Catherine (Fanny Ardant) has been married to Bernard (Gérard Depardieu) for 25 years. When she finds out that he has been dallying with other women she hires Nathalie (Emmanuelle Béart) to seduce him and report back to her.

The French evidently are obsessed by the casual sexual encounter. What in Anglo-American culture would be regarded as sexploitation film-making, in France is given high-production gloss, a brochure-style Parisian setting and dignified by an A-list cast, usually one principal male of rumpled demeanour and one or two chic females. Largely indistinguishable from one another, from a non-French perspective at least, they appear to be culturally-templated fantasies designed to satisfy, or titivate, a middle-class audience.

Written by a woman (Maggie Perlado-Ridao), the main premise of Nathalie is quite interesting as it plays with the dualistic image of woman in patriarchial society as virgin (mother) and whore. It splits the two faces of woman between two separate characters (played by Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Béart respectively) and explores the tension and permeability between their identities, physically and psychologically. So far so good.

Unfortunately the director, Anne Fontaine, has not only packaged this interesting concept in the over-familiar templated form referred to, right down to the Leonard Cohen song on the soundtrack, she’s not even done it very well. Emmanuelle Béart, who appears to have had her lips embellished into a Brigitte Bardot pout, as a prostitute, needless to say, provides the soft-core titivation. Or at least the idea of it, for unlike Bardot, she is no screen vamp and Fontaine makes her look as attractive as a halibut in drag. Fanny Ardant, who is supposed to be a gynaecologist (!), is infinitely more erotically-charged (and wise enough to keep her kit on) but that is more a gift of nature than a result of her performance, which is largely confined to elegant poses and pained expressions. Dépardieu, playing her dutiful dupe of a husband, a successful businessman of an undefined ilk, simply punches the clock and picks up his pay.

After setting up the scenario of neglected, repressed wife, preoccupied, errant husband Fontaine launches into the main body of the film which concerns the wife exploring her husband’s sexuality vicariously via the prostitute. This is done entirely in terms of Nathalie’s lurid verbal recounting of her assignations to the avid Catherine. This may have worked well in the form of an erotic novel but is visually and narratively dull, and given that Nathalie is supposedly of limited eduction, implausibly literary. It drags on to the point that one is internally begging for something to happen, for the women to have a pash or Dépardieu to throw a scene-chewing wobbly. By the time something does happen (in a fashion reminiscent of Ozon’s Swimming Pool) one has been so deadened by Nathalie’s and Catharine’s back-and-forth neuroses that the only interest aroused is that this latest projection of the Gallic psyche is nearly over.

 

 

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