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"I like breaking down walls. Don't you?" La Belle dormant (Carole Laure) married to the driving instructor (Gérard Depardieu), she gulps sauerkraut listlessly while he asks a random beardo (Patrick Dewaere) if he'd like to sleep with her, anything to stir the neurasthenic goddess. The befuddled fellow is game after a fashion and adds the beauty to his other passions, Mozart and pocket books. All to no avail, thus two lunkheads in matching sweaters wondering why they cannot get a rise out of the wife knitting topless in bed. "A woman's nervous system is like the weather, we don't understand either one." The answer turns out to be children, namely the pubescent prodigy (Riton Liebman) who endures pastry projectiles from colleagues at summer camp. ("They have their idea of fun, I have mine," he shrugs, wiping petit-suisse from his schnoz.) The lad might be ol' Amadeus himself reincarnated despite a preference for Schubert, and gets a rare giggle from the heroine by gravelly questioning the intellect of the blokes. "The IQ is located in the brain, not the balls." "Yeah, but the brain controls the balls, man," or is it the other way around? Between transgression and cuteness, a perennial Bertrand Blier formulation. His men are never closer than when bonding over their incomprehension of women, the boy bats cleanup and is embraced by l'idéal féminin, the shift is from Une Femme est une femme to Le Souffle au coeur. Piquant drollery for a placid camera: The neighbor (Michel Serrault) comes to complain about the noise and stays as an unofficial member of the ménage, he's last seen with an amnesiac doyenne by her overturned car. Cheerful kidnapping, clandestine pregnancy, the lady awake at last and more out of reach than ever. "Excuse me. Sometimes I start thinking my dreams are real." The Buñuelian tenor of the ending segues straight into Buffet Froid. With Eléonore Hirt, Jean Rougerie, Sylvie Joly, Liliane Rovère, and Gilberte Géniat.
--- Fernando F. Croce |