by BERTIE MANDELBLATT

If there’s a model for the making of contemporary French blockbusters, judging from such recent entries as Amélie Poulain and 8 femmes, it must have to do with fairy tale narratives, self-consciously styley mise-en-scène (especially with the use of colour) and an almost exclusively female cast. Now Filles perdues, cheveux gras brings all these elements together and zooms into the stratosphere, powered by a reappropriation of the musical genre similar to what we saw in 8 femmes.

The film is built around the interlocking stories of three young women trying to resolve their respective crises. Each is intended to represent a separate sector of society, although the divisions are purely aesthetic, believe me. Olivia Bonamy plays the enraged proletarian single mother trying to retrieve the daughter taken from her after a suicide attempt; Marina Foïs is the lonely alcoholic bourgeoise in miniskirts searching for the cat she accidentally knocks out the window during her first musical number; and Amira Casar is an artsy intellectual trying to work up the courage to ditch her cruel seducer, the owner of the art gallery where she works. (Interestingly, “artsy” in the world of French film directors equals 1980s goth as far as I can see: lots of black, fishnet everything and upside down crucifixes. Does this pass as art in France?)

The film begins as a musical and heads quickly down the road towards fantasy as the characters meet, elaborate their miserable existences and work out ways to help each other. It ends in an enchanted forest (complete with a fawn drinking at a pond under a full moon) after a few clever diversions like a Disneyesque animated sequence and the problematic and entirely gratuitous appearance of some ethnic Others (a Masai warrior and a Latin American pan pipe group, for instance).

The full-on campiness of Filles Perdues is comical at moments and spectacular and well-acted throughout, but the essential vacuity of it will appeal only to those with a desperate and undiscriminating need for French entertainment lite. :

Filles perdues, cheveux gras opens October 18

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