Starring: Mathilde Seigner, Maïwenn, Arielle Dombasle, Massimo Ranieri Script: Claude Lelouch Original Title: Le Genre Humain Running Time: 1:59 Country: France Year: 2005 Official Site: Men & Women

After seeing Claude Lelouch's Men & Women, a postmodern pudding blending parts 1 and 2 of an unfinished trilogy, whose premise was both a critical and box office disaster in his homeland, I'm not sure that the French filmmaker still has a place in this new cinematic century.

The film follows the stories of various couples with, at the center, the love-hate relationship between Massimo, real-life Italian singer Massimo Ranieri, and Shaa (Maïwenn), his beautiful singing partner who abandons him to follow her path to stardom.

Since A Man and a Woman back in the 60's, Lelouch has built a career studying the intricate relationship between men and women, plunging this universal theme through various settings—historical, geographical and social filters—which would ultimately prove that love always prevails. While Lelouch's equation remained pretty simplistic throughout the past 4 decades, it had at least the merit to fulfill several generations' needs for onscreen romanticism and melodrama, especially fitting the carefree "air du temps" in the 60's and 70's.

But 40 years later, formulism yields to self-parody as the filmmaker, carried away by his own cinematic shadow, is attempting to bring his work to a new century, with a definite trilogy soberly called "Mankind". The New Year celebration acts here as a transition point, not as an ending but rather as a new beginning, which is supposed to transcend both his characters and his filmmaking heritage. Combining the time factor to the title of the trilogy, Lelouch sums up 40 years of films for a new generation in some kind of package that's supposed to tie all thematic ends.

Men & Women is built as a self-reflective work, Lelouch playing the—now overdone—card of the "film within the film", even writing himself into his own picture, thus emphasizing here his own role in film history, trying to make sure we are fully aware of his legacy. The "film within a film" trick aims at blurring the lines between reality and fiction, the director positioning himself as a filmmaker of ultra-realism—he even mentions it himself when convincing Shaa and Massimo to play their own roles in his movie.

This ambitious approach—that some would call pretentious—would be legitimate, if the content of the picture was as high as the idea Lelouch has of his filmography. The soap opera aspect of the picture, bad dialogues and a few miscast choices, however, tell another story, the story of a stinker that its desperate creator tries to salvage through his last resort—editing. In Men and Women, you will learn that love works better within the same social class—a pizza maker and a well-read actress are not a good match—, that betraying love for glory is bad and that "Le bonheur c'est mieux que la vie" (happiness is better than life) as the theme song hammers throughout the film, in case you didn't get it.

But the main issue here isn't the poor screenplay, the approximate direction, or even the unlucky casting against type—I'm thinking about the presence of stand-up "comic" Michel Leeb as a baron of pizzas—but Lelouch's propensity to be stuck in the past, 40 years earlier, as he was penning his characters. Not only is the way they behave outdated, in a cheesy romantic way that made 60's films charming but in total contrast with the cynicism and raw sexuality of our times, but dialogues are so ridiculously archaic that they repeatedly lead to unintentional laughs. Lelouch's cinema is anachronistic and that's probably what jeopardizes his chance to reserve a place in modern cinema.

  Fred Thom

     French Film Reviews
     French Music Reviews

     French DVD Store