Homage to the Jacques Demy of Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Young Girls of Rochefort, and A Room in Town, the connoisseur and custodian of the Golden Age musical. Co-directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau have taken from Demy the idea of a musical as a casual kind of thing, a form removed from reality by just a hop and a skip, and they have taken the idea of backing up the surface gaiety with a thematic dark shadow. (To forestall any accusations of stealing without giving credit, they have cast Demy's son, Mathieu, in the male lead: they've nothing to hide.) Though the filmmakers can easily enough take an idea or two, they cannot take also the total sense of color, space, movement, proportion. They plainly have more taste and show more care in those areas than most filmmakers, and they stage a couple of particularly pleasant numbers in a Chinese fast-food joint, against a shimmering waterfall mural, and in a bookstore, with a flirtatiously helpful clerk. Most of their numbers, though, fall flat or never get off the ground. And they have altered the delicate balance of a Demy musical by pushing the dark shadow very much into the foreground: their promiscuous young heroine (Virginie Ledoyen, whose singing, like Deneuve's in a Demy musical, is dubbed) has been keeping herself well occupied while waiting for the right man to come along, and when he comes, he comes with AIDS. The result is a little indelicate and off-balance. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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