Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Curt Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

markfranh This should have been a much better movie that it was as so many others here have essentially written.The DVD came with a director/screenwriter/author interview (i.e. one and the same person, Emmanuelle Carrere) which my wife and I watched after the movie in an effort to understand what he was trying to achieve and which we had obviously missed. In it, Carrere implies (it was in French so I can only give you the gist of it) that he expected the viewer to wonder if it was that Marc was going crazy, whether it was his wife Agnes who was going crazy, whether it was a grand conspiracy, or whether Marc had somehow slipped into a parallel universe (or universes plural) when he shaves off his moustache. If that was his intention, then he failed miserably in the film.Let's take the points one at a time.Was Marc insane? Well, if he wanted us to believe that, then he NEVER should have shown us the moustache! And yet, in act 1, scene 1, 2 seconds into the film, he shows us the moustache! Ergo, it exists. Ergo, Marc is not nuts. If we were perhaps supposed to believe that the early moustache scene was just a figment of Marc's imagination, then fine, but then why on earth show us Marc looking at photos of him sporting his moustache a few minutes later and showing US the photos at the same time. The moustache existed. End of theory. The problem is not that Marc is insane.Sadly, this could have been achieved so easily with the proper direction. DON'T SHOW US THE MOUSTACHE!!! EVER. If we never see it, then we will have doubts about Marc's sanity. In the opening scene, hide his face. Perhaps under a cover of thick shaving foam so we aren't sure what's beneath. Perhaps we only hear his voice calling out from the bathroom as he has gone into shave before going out with his wife. But don't show us his face! When he looks at the photos of himself sporting a moustache then WE shouldn't see the photos. Only Marc sees them and we should be left wondering what he is seeing in his confused mind.Is Agnes insane? I never saw this as a possibility so why suggest it? It made no sense to believe this. After all, I counted at least 6 other people presented in the film who also didn't believe that Marc had ever had a moustache. So why would we believe Agnes was insane when so many others deny the moustache as well? If that was one of his intentions, then he failed totally here.Was it a grand conspiracy? Well, at least it was a possibility for a few minutes but even that doesn't hold water. How could the child Lara pull it off? How could the conspirators have control over the cafe owner? Most of all, how could they arrange for phone numbers to no longer work or for addresses to disappear? Grand conspiracy? If we were supposed to believe that as a possibility, then some of the conspirators had to have at least let their masks partially drop early on with some sort of statement that had double meanings to suggest that there was at least something going on. Perhaps the cafe owner could have said something like, "there's something different about you but I can't put my finger on it ...". Something vague to leave open a possibility. But there was nothing. So much for grand conspiracies.What does that leave? That Marc is in some sort of science fiction world where he has slipped into a parallel universe by shaving off his moustache and that he keeps moving into universes with more and more differences as the minutes pass. What else could it have been? Nothing remained. That's what I believed throughout and there was no possibility of anything else.Unfortunately, I felt even the ending was all too predictable but I won't go into the flaws with it as it would give away too much. I could envision a variation that would have been far more interesting but I don't dare include it in a spoilerless review.Sadly, I'm sure this was all done very well in the novel (not that I've read it). We never see the moustache in the novel of course. We only have his word for it (Marc or the narrator) that it exists. We will always have doubts. The other possibilities might also have been better presented. I'll never know as I can't be bothered tracking down the novel.I have long believed that an author of a novel should NEVER be allowed to direct his own work or even be the sole screenwriter when a movie is suggested. Too often, it ends up being a disaster and that is what has happened here. Writers just too often do not see the problem with what they have written when they try to make it visual and that is exactly what has happened with this film.What worked (I assume) in the novel, does NOT work on the screen but Carrere was so tied up in what he wrote years earlier that he doesn't see the flaws of putting his written work onto the screen. An independent director might have seen the problems of allowing us to see the moustache and done it entirely differently so that doubts remained about what was going. Sorry to say, we'll never know.By the way, can somebody please tell me what the point of the multiple ferry crossings was? Was it symbolic of something? That perhaps was the most baffling sequence in the film and something that made no sense to either my wife or myself. Was it symbolic of something? If so, it escaped us.

skatebski When we stubbled across this movie, we discovered that this hair-raising thriller is certainly tuft to follow. Marc, the mane character, with a rather stiff upper lip, wigs out after he shaves his mustache. On the fringe of a mental breakdown, Marc finds himself in a hairy situation. Whom can he tress? When his crew cuts him out of his life, Marc dreads the prospect of insanity and waves goodbye to his roots. He leaves all his split ends behind in France, and come 5 o'clock, he's merely a shadow of his former self. To call the movie bland would be a bald statement. The intricacies weave together within a trim 80 minutes, and there's no big blow- out at the end of the film. The dialogue was razor sharp, and Marc looked scruffy. He pelts out of France to Hong Kong, making sure to grab his coat (what is he trying to hide?) The plot's not all fluff.

peterlemass This is the first time I've felt compelled to write a review because I feel that watching this movie was a big fat waste of time - and a fairly annoying tedious time at that. If you are wondering whether to spend 1 and a half hours of your life watching this movie - I would recommend against it.Warning spoilers below:He shaves off his moustache. His wife then says he never had one. He has photos to prove he does. He never sits with his wife and shows them to her. He has an ID card and passport which show he has a moustache. He never shows her these either.Then he goes to Hong Kong, on his own and writes his wife a postcard which he doesn't get to post. Next thing we know she has been with him in Hong Kong all along. But the postcard is still in the pocket of the jacket he came in. Instead of showing her this, he throws it away!Are we are supposed to believe it was all a dream?Or is he switching realities?Or is it the writer trying to tell us to accept whatever crazy non-nonsensical reality we find ourselves in without questioning it, as long as there is some saucy french woman to keep us company?The film left me quite unsatisfied and a bit annoyed that I had sat through the whole thing.

board-5 Interesting French drama focusing to a men's relationship with he's wife. SPOILER-Sometimes our self picture is not what other people can see in us.The relationship what this man has seems normal for me.I mean almost all relationship has little problems.This man just can not understand why he's wife ,friends ,work-partners,don't realize he cut down he's fringe.But when he start to make he's relationship better ,in unusual way,the things are start to change.The acting is important in a film like this ,almost the most important,and I think they were enough for this time.Script:The creators did not think you are stupid.So strange but good film.