Reviewed by David Levinson

THEY SAY THAT imitation is the lowest form of flattery. Apply that model to the Woody Allen-French axis and what you have is a relationship that's been thrown into reverse lopsidedness. Allen, it would seem (hardly [if any?] of his millenium work has actually received theatrical distribution here), is on the decline, taking graceless backward-leaps into the primordial ooze of his own desperate, narcissistic sense of criticism (self- and otherwise).


Neuroses in art is by no means a deathwish, though; problems only arise once things are left to incubate in the artist's ego, paving the way for what deserves to be described in no other way than an artistic crywank. The most appropriate thing to do, it seems, is for the artist to siphon theirself out of the immediate picture, redirecting their assaults so that what you end up with is someone like David Foster Wallace using character affliction to explore contemporary anxiety and the self-awareness overload. With Allen, on the other hand, it's weightless, bile-ridden, a melee fought on the unchanging battleground of his own tear-strung libido.

Anyway, you know what else they say: when the wife's no longer putting out, it's time to call on the (French) mistress. And it's that implicit difference which seems to define the space between Allen and Pierre Salvadori's Après vous..., a riff francais on Allen's cosmology: it's a film that's dumb and broad-based, but also not without a kind of youthful swagger and curvaceous disregard for faux pas that gets it through its programmatic plotting. Basically, if you're willing to accept it on its own terms, then there shouldn't really be any problems – and deciding whether you want to do that doesn't require you looking much further than the first scene, in which Daniel Auteil (as Antoine), is inconvenienced, while on his way home, by a guy trying to hang himself. All of the ethical paperwork – Antoine's recognition of what he's done, etc. – is completed post-incident, but for a minute there what you have is death reduced to a playground brawl of hard, catty egos, as Antoine attempts to wrestle him free from his noose, the man all the while pleading to be left alone to die. Throw in a misplaced object of affection and the end result is a romcom gene-spliced with the arrested psychological-awareness of someone who didn't quite make it through 101: hence, each of the principle three is condemned by a single defining hang-up: Antoine is parasitically helpful; Louis has the self-confidence of lint; and Blanche is perpetually in need of being attached. The rest of the film tends to writhe with the jaunty inconsistency of a scattergram, rising and falling according to its willingness to exploit each Achille's heel. In other words, things are at their giddy best when at their most obtuse, single characters having been dumped in social minefields and left to squirm. For example, Louis' job interview, a slightly more upholstered version of The Office's induce-feelings-of-crawling-through-barbed-wire-in-the-viewer tactics. For example, Antoine's hyper-convoluted attempts to reconcile Louis with his florist of a femme, including faking a phone conversation in-store, and having to send her out to a delivery van at least four times until she finally discovers her current beau inside, err, buttering a baguette, so to speak...

But hey, everyone knows that the problem with the French is that they try too hard (kidding). But if only Salvadori could have aspired to make nothing more than a hair-trigger comedy of embarrassments, and that would have been a pretty satisfying that. Instead he has to get all wishy-washy on us and shit, and throw in a bunch of scenes where characters – like – push through their anxiety while fending off possible saucers of antagonism, in the hope of reaching stable ground as adults who Do What's Right (and shit). The slip-slide into pathos isn't anything to inspire vertigo, especially considering the fact that the characters have been pre-established as damaged; it's just that once the cogs are set in place, they really don't do much to change, and you're stuck going through the same grind-fuck motions of characters falling in and out of like with one another, until finally the thing just has to end and their libidos are hosed down long enough to make an actual decision.