Weekly round-up

A pedestrian French romcom and a
powerful but uneven doc on torture

VICTIMS’ VOICES: Under the Hood

by MALCOLM FRASER and
CHRISTOPHER SYKES

Mes amis, mes amours

Lorraine Levy’s romantic comedy is quite the anomaly. Having adapted her brother Marc’s best-selling novel, set in the French ex-pat enclave of South Kensington in London, is a nifty feat in itself. But turning the entire borough into an entirely French-speaking arrondissement is nothing short of miraculous.

Living inside this unlikely Franco-bubble are disgruntled middle-aged divorcés Antoine (Pascal Elbé) and Mathias (Vincent Lindon). As Elbé is heading up a well-to-do architecture firm, he suggests that best bud Lindon make the move across the Channel and join him amongst the red double-deckers. Down on his luck, Lindon accepts, and he and his young daughter move in with Elbé and his young son. One’s a neat freak, the other a slob.

If the premise sounds like something that would’ve been written for Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau 40 years ago, I’ve done it justice. While Lindon and Elbé are most certainly an odd couple, they’ve little of Lemmon’s charisma or Matthau’s wit. As such they stumble through what’s meant to be a build-up of tension over the family’s living conditions.

But what would a romcom be without a misguided love interest? Drama builds regarding whether Lindon will go back to his ex or continue courting the much younger, stunningly beautiful journalist Audrey (Virginie Ledoyen). Tough choice, that one. About as difficult as deciding whether to call Mes amis laughably out of touch with reality or just insufferably pedestrian. I’ll split the difference and call it a waste of time. (CS)

Under the Hood

Considering the recent epidemic of “Iraq fatigue,” an NFB-produced documentary about state-sanctioned torture has its work cut out for it in terms of attracting a wide audience. Montreal-based director Patricio Henríquez, who fled his native Chile after the coup by torture-happy dictator Augusto Pinochet, starts off focusing on various prisoners of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and their lesser-known equivalents in Afghanistan. After some testimony from these men, along with a couple of disillusioned American military officers who confirm the detainees’ horrifying treatment, Henríquez shifts the focus to Latin America, where the Pentagon-run School of the Americas has given many nefarious regimes the training they need to properly oppress their people.

Though the film’s politics are unassailable and its stories gripping by nature, its two main points—torture is horrible, and the U.S. government is complicit in it—are fairly well known at this point. From a purely cinematic perspective, I would be remiss in not addressing the film’s meandering structure, its length (at 107 minutes, it could have comfortably lost 10 or so), and its occasional use of bizarre camera angles during interviews, which detract from the often powerful content.

As well, typical of an NFB social-issues doc, the earnestness and lack of subtlety are likely to confine it to an audience of the converted. Which is unfortunate, as the people who most need to see this are those who’ve expressed any ambivalence about the morality of using torture (a certain Liberal Party leadership hopeful comes to mind). (MF)