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French director Benoît Jacquot, not yet 60, has always been a dirty old man. His penchant for 18th and early 19th century works notwithstanding ( La Fausse Suivante, Adolphe) , his films tend to find a place for exploitation (young girls' quivering flesh, grown women's tears), and then, well, exploit it. He may pretend to sexual nonchalance in that inimitable French way (you can almost hear the la-di-das filter through the imaginary soundtrack), but his camera lens stands unmistakably at attention as he leers droolingly at his manipulated bodies in motion. The lechery leaks through the contours of his mise-en-scène ( tissue , you think, I hardly know you ), as American critics, in thrall to the Francofêting of the female frontispiece (so to speak), call it high art. I am not a Jacquot fan, though I admit to favoring the notable exception. À tout de suite is not such an exception. Despite a title that translates into "right away," or (more awkwardly, as the English alternative gives it Based on an autobiographical tale by Elizabeth Fanger, or so it is said, À tout de suite tells the story of a froward bourgeoise art student (Isild Le Besco, Girls Can't Swim) who, after waking up in some state of undress with her best girlfriend--hidden in her spacious bedroom in the Beaux Arts home poorly overseen by her divorced father, goes poutingly to class, throws a stagey hissy fit in a bar against some guy with whom she had so-what sex, is struck by a coup de foudre for some ordinary-looking taciturn Moroccan she spies from afar (Ouassini Embarek, of the pointlessly deplorable Baise-moi ) who turns out to be more interesting than he appears, and then follows him (with his lowlife partner and his own bourgeoise moll) to what might as well be the ends of the earth. (The political commentary is unsubtle, but may be glossed over by the larger part of the American audience, who should consider themselves fortunate). The year is 1975, which explains the black and white. Everything in 1975 was black and white. I remember. Greatly praised for its crispness, the stylization is nothing more than a blur of pretension. Billed as a thriller (the couples are on the lam from the law, shhhh), À tout de suite does take us through some tentatively tense moments, but it The intellectual overlay, or the one that is claimed, is the intended illustration of one woman's succumbing to the seduction of the underworld, but that must be a metaphor for the peep-show flipbook of Le Besco's naked body (which was, I think, the point of reference for the L.A. Times hyperbolic claim that the film is "supple" and "breathtakingly direct" and the N.Y. Times's "nearly perfect") cinematically caressed against a series of interchangeable stand-ins (the number and gender of which at any given time is inconsequential) around the Mediterranean coast. Self-actualization, the reviews call it. Talk about euphemisms.
©2005 Shari L. Rosenblum |
Á Tout de Suite 
"right now"), the film offers nothing remotely close to a sense of immediacy. Even in its most urgent movements, it is slow in the worst of the mock New Wave styles, moving with leaden lasciviousness from one yeah-right encounter to the next who-even-cares, its black-and-white conceit serving only to highlight the absence of color in the narrative. Even the nudity is numbing. Jacquot may want us to be sobered by the (faux) sadness of the resolution, but by the time he gets us there, tedium has long since taken up all of our emotive space. 
does so with among the least compelling criminal-types in all of filmdom. (I had my fingers crossed the whole time that they'd be caught and put an end to my boredom.). I found no thrill in the close-up after washed-out close-up of the unappealing heroine, a disenchanting version of some if-they-mated experiment between Tori Spelling and Tilda Swinton: oddly set features, see-through skin and a clunkiness that prevents her from being ethereal. Perhaps more directly related to her acting than her looks, she struck me rather as a blow up doll. All puff and no pizzazz. And hers was the film's most sustaining performance. 