If you want to discover this woman director,you 'd better pick up her steadier,more palatable "Le Jour Des Rois" (1990) ,one of the wittiest French comedies of the nineties which,sadly,remained unsung.
If you 've already seen this film,and you're going to appreciate "Simone Barbès", you'd best forget about all this 1990 delightful comedy,because it's much less accessible .
This effort is made up of three parts :an excellent first one, a shaky and very uneven second one , and a very boring final one.
Simone is an usherette in a porno movie theater with her colleague Martine ; Treilhou,who writes her screenplays, lets her humor flow and it's really a joy to watch the audience enter this special place ;don't expect to get an eyeful though:all we get in the small hall where both employees chat is the soundtrack made of shouts , pantings, and jerky words such as "Ouiiiiiiii" "encore";the contrast with the impassive faces of the usherettes is striking ;we catch glimpses of the clients : some are ashamed,some are in a hurry,some are intellectuals ,you name it ;Simone is thoroughly at ease with this stange bunch and tries to console Martine ,whose boyfriend let her down.
The second part lets us in a lesbian nightclub,a place rarely shown in movies, unlike gay men places ; here Treilhou gives up her collection of mini-portraits ,and depicts the atmosphere :Simone ,herself a lesbian,waits in vain for her girlfriend;her attitude is more self-conscious ,whe's no more the cheeky usherette who laughs at her habitués in the porno theater .The actress is outshadowed by the acts which drowns her out : the Amazons ballet and rock group 12°5 's "Si Je suis Une Nana ,Mec"(if I'm a chick, dude) the words of which may seem ludicrous,but in that context come out almost threatening . This atmosphere had already been depicted by feminist director Jacqiueline Audry's "La Garçonne" (1957) and Treilhou's sequence suffers in this comparison :what was daring in 1957 might seem trite a quarter of century later.
The last part,which entirely takes place in a car is boring and comes as an anti-climax :Martine chats with an aging womanizer who pays the price of loneliness ;nothing new here ,a most inadequate ending to an interesting film about fringe groups .
If you 've already seen this film,and you're going to appreciate "Simone Barbès", you'd best forget about all this 1990 delightful comedy,because it's much less accessible .
This effort is made up of three parts :an excellent first one, a shaky and very uneven second one , and a very boring final one.
Simone is an usherette in a porno movie theater with her colleague Martine ; Treilhou,who writes her screenplays, lets her humor flow and it's really a joy to watch the audience enter this special place ;don't expect to get an eyeful though:all we get in the small hall where both employees chat is the soundtrack made of shouts , pantings, and jerky words such as "Ouiiiiiiii" "encore";the contrast with the impassive faces of the usherettes is striking ;we catch glimpses of the clients : some are ashamed,some are in a hurry,some are intellectuals ,you name it ;Simone is thoroughly at ease with this stange bunch and tries to console Martine ,whose boyfriend let her down.
The second part lets us in a lesbian nightclub,a place rarely shown in movies, unlike gay men places ; here Treilhou gives up her collection of mini-portraits ,and depicts the atmosphere :Simone ,herself a lesbian,waits in vain for her girlfriend;her attitude is more self-conscious ,whe's no more the cheeky usherette who laughs at her habitués in the porno theater .The actress is outshadowed by the acts which drowns her out : the Amazons ballet and rock group 12°5 's "Si Je suis Une Nana ,Mec"(if I'm a chick, dude) the words of which may seem ludicrous,but in that context come out almost threatening . This atmosphere had already been depicted by feminist director Jacqiueline Audry's "La Garçonne" (1957) and Treilhou's sequence suffers in this comparison :what was daring in 1957 might seem trite a quarter of century later.
The last part,which entirely takes place in a car is boring and comes as an anti-climax :Martine chats with an aging womanizer who pays the price of loneliness ;nothing new here ,a most inadequate ending to an interesting film about fringe groups .