Je me fais rare (2006) User Reviews

Le cinema est Mort vive Le cinema (Cinema is dead long live the cinema !)

[frenchfilm6 · 7/10 · 6 March 2007]

Far from the serious big productions and the intellectual positions, you will find Dante Desarthe, French director and proud to be unknown. Very close to Dante Desarthe, you will find his clownish double, Daniel Danite. Director still more unknown, pedant and obsessed, he's totally ignorant of the art of framing and managing a team. In comparison, Ed Wood is a genius. Daniel Danite declares himself as a "Don Quichote of the amateurs", a "James Bond of the auto fiction". It's actually more an endearing looser, a distorting mirror revealing what would be the fashionable directors if they weren't supported by the producers and if money wasn't counterbalancing their absence of imagination. Je me fais rare is a requiem for a French cinema incompetent and pedant. But does Dante Desarthe really believe what Daniel Danite says? The character seems so impossibly vain that detachment is automatic. The cinema isn't dead: this film is a measure of prevention against the death of cinema. Comical, absurd, Je me fais rare raises the flag of the wannabes and of the voluntary imperfections. Dante Desarthe would deserve a statue…seated in the middle of a street and absorbed in the contemplation of a whirligig.

A film like no other, about art and humanity, with a lot of humor.

[kinoouf · 10/10 · 13 December 2007]

"Je me fais rare" is an excellent movie. I haven't seen any of that kind before. It's hilarious, and yet deep and also bitter. As if Woody Allen and Nanni Moretti had lunch together, and Godard came for desert. What I appreciated the most is the fact that the main character, Daniel Danite, is very infatuated, almost preposterous, but we learn to like him little by little, as the movie goes on, mainly because he is kind and accurate. A lot is told about cinema, art, humanity, love, friendship in a film that is supposed to be an underground comedy. (great scenes with Michel, the assistant director, and Penelope, the woman editor, great scene with a false porno actor) This film proves that it is hard to kill cinema as an art-form, and that without millions , you can do a very witty and intelligent movie that is also entertaining and above all, funny. A must see for all cinema lovers.