Agnès Jaoui's wonderful second feature "Look At Me" opens this year's New York Film Festival. The film, which already won the best screenplay award at Cannes, is talky but never dull, fluidly crossing over from drama to comedy to social satire.
The story centers on the fraught relationship of twenty-year old Lolita (Marilou Berry), an overweight and terrifically angry young woman, and her famous writer father Etienne (Jean-Pierre Bacri). Etienne is a difficult man, accustomed to abject worship from not only his fans but family and friends alike. In his entourage, he has his beautiful wife Karine (Virginie Desarnauts), not much older than his Lolita, and a seemingly perfect infant daughter – except for her occasionally violent temper tantrums involving ice cream. Etienne also has an assistant, Vincent (Gregoire Oestermann), a consistently hilarious presence on screen who exists solely to reinforce Etienne's high opinion of himself and run necessary errands.
Lolita has the impossible task of competing for affection from a man that more than likely doesn't exist. In a fantastic debut performance, Berry conveys Lolita's emotional inner flailing, a vulnerability that is masked by rage, as she constantly lashes out, more often than not at the wrong people. Lolita is also angry at her father's wife, who clearly wants to be kind, at Sylvia, her music teacher she obviously adores (Agnès Jaoui, who not only writes and directs but acts in the film) and the potential boyfriend who genuinely cares for her (Keine Bouhiza.)
In an interesting coincidence, Sylvia is married to a writer, Pierre (Laurent Grevill), whose sudden success propels the couple into the same social circle as Lolita and her father. Like Lolita, Pierre is also flailing; he revels in the newfound attention, and in the process, begins to lose a sense of who he was, mistreating his long-time publisher Edith (Michele Moretti), his creative partner Felix (Jean-Pierre Lazzerni) and his wife, who has the irritating and extremely ungratifying tendency to speak the truth.
The intersection of these people, who come together in a beautiful home in the French countryside, is told with loving honesty, combining incisive observation with humor that never ridicules its subjects. "Look At Me" is a wonderfully emphatic and entertaining film.
