The prevailing opinion seems to be that beauty is a good thing. Fashion, make-up, plastic surgery ““ we spend a lot of money based on that assumption. But what if it turned out that beauty had a dark side? What would that look like?
Cue “The Girl From Monaco,” a strange and somewhat underwhelming comedy from French writer and director Anne Fontaine.
Beauty, in this case, looks like Audrey Varella (Louise Bourgoin), one bombshell of a weather girl from Monaco. Bourgoin plays her spunky and vacuous with a sizeable helping of mischief, and the first few times you see her you hope the part continues to go the way of Marilyn Monroe in “Some Like It Hot.”
But then she catches sight of Bertrand Beauvois (Fabrice Luchini), a man with graying hair and plenty of nerves. He’s the latest in a string of lawyers who have come to Monaco to try defending Édith Lassalle (Stéphane Audran), a woman with about as much money as you’d expect from someone who lives in Monaco.
Audrey is drawn to Bertrand’s aura, and they find themselves connecting soon enough when Bertrand gives an interview at her television station. She makes a few appropriately ditzy attempts to explain the cosmic forces behind her attraction to him, but it really doesn’t matter. The question isn’t how Bertrand can get the girl, it’s what he does, assuming ““ let’s just pretend for a moment ““ that he’s already gotten her.
She’s the premise, not the goal. So don’t bother complaining about how completely ridiculous it is that Audrey has even a fleeting interest in this guy who’s older than her parents, because that’s not the point.
The point is that Audrey’s affections do destructive, compromising things to Bertrand’s way of life. This is a man so skilled in the courtroom, we’re led to believe that he may be Lassalle’s only hope, even though his high-profile client appears determined to act as if she’s guilty. But this is also a man not used to pretty young girls batting their eyelashes at him, and Audrey has some very distracting eyelashes.
That’s where the dark side of beauty comes in.
The primary concern of “The Girl From Monaco” is to show how quickly and thoroughly Bertrand falls apart once Audrey grabs hold of his hormones. There’s no question we’re supposed to see this as a bad thing, but whose fault is it?
Even Audrey, in all her blondeness, must have noticed what she’s doing to Bertrand. But he’s a big boy, and a smart one, and his repeated failures to pull himself together are frustratingly pathetic.
Fortunately for Bertrand, and for us, he’s got Cristophe (Roschdy Zem). Cristophe is Bertrand’s bodyguard and romantic antithesis, a ladies’ man with little interest in slowing down and enjoying the journey, and he just so happens to have a history with Audrey.
This is lucky for Bertrand, because Cristophe does his best to keep Audrey away from him, and lucky for us, because Zem strikes a delightful balance between stolid and compassionate and gives us the film’s only reasonable character.
An interesting set of dynamics emerges between Audrey and the two men, but ultimately “The Girl From Monaco” fails to elicit deep feelings of any kind.
Bertrand gathers sympathy for a while, but he is so utterly incapable of taking care of himself that you start to wonder, would it be such a bad thing if he took Audrey back to Paris with him? Sure she’d sleep around a bit, but at least Cristophe would be free to go babysit someone else.
So the film ends up looking like Monaco itself: There’s quite a bit of pretty scenery, but don’t expect to find much substance. Maybe that’s the dark side of beauty after all, the illusion that when you’ve got it, you don’t need anything else.
““ Alex Goodman