French relationship comedy revolving around a self-important novelist and his self-loathing daughter, an overweight failed actress now in training as a classical vocalist. The film reveals itself, and its characters, gradually and organically, unfolding like life. Some of it is perhaps too painful to be funny, yet our recognition of human strivings and failings can touch off moderate mirth, if never violent hilarity, anywhere along the way, on no set schedule. The artists most responsible for this wise, wily, observant, truly adult entertainment are the writing and acting team of Jean-Pierre Bacri and Agnès Jaoui, who previously wrote and acted in Un Air de Famille, Same Old Song, and The Taste of Others, the last of which was also Jaoui's first directing job. Look at Me is her second, and is as fluid a job as you could desire, even if you might desire an image a little less jaundiced. In front of the camera, Bacri of course takes the role of the literary lion, and cements his position as the cinema's supreme sourpuss. Jaoui is the daughter's voice coach, a delicate part played with quiet finesse. And newcomer Marilou Berry, daughter of the actress-writer-director Josiane Balasko, plays the hefty daughter, with no fudging of her heftiness: no mere plumpness passed off as corpulence; no padding for extra poundage. She thus falls in line with the likes of Romane Bohringer (The Accompanist), Sylvie Testud (Murderous Maids), Roxane Mesquida (Fat Girl), not to mention her real-life mother (Too Beautiful for You), nonlookers of various types who seem to gain access to French screens more readily than their counterparts do to American. In her role here, she is not the sort of endomorph who is comfortable in her stretched skin: stout and proud. She carries a boulder-sized chip on her shoulder, and she slumps under the weight of it. In her father's eyes, "She's anger on wheels." She is not, in anyone's eyes, easy to like. One of the many strengths of the film is that it grants her, and us, all the time and help we need. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd
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