| VENUS BEAUTY INSTITUTE Director: Toni Marshal "Once at night when I was driving, I saw that they were opening a small beauty parlor. It was all pink, and there was a beautician dressed in pink, moving very slowly and trying to close the shop. It was like a ballet, a dance, or an image of a movie, and I thought it was interesting if the character was working in that sort of place. I went in there, and all the characters in the movie were inspired by what I heard and saw there." Toni Marshall Venus Beauty Institute is a light romance comedy that takes place mostly in a salon. And while it has good performances and the kind of winning story that is rarely seen in the French films that get released here, it’s also rather shallow. Similar to getting a facial; it's enjoyable while you're experiencing it but it’s not too memorable once its finished. Angele (Nathalie Baye) is an attractive forty-year-old woman who lives her life as if she were still in her early 20’s. She works in a beauty salon with two younger women, lives a fast and loos life and refuses to settle down with anyone choosing instead to go out and play the field as long as she can. She claims she doesn’t want to fall in love but it’s clear she’s living in denial. After a break-up with an inconsiderate guy, another one (Samuel Le Bihan) comes along, follows her for a while and then after a few days of stalking her tells her he is in love. She is immediately turned off because he is scruffy looking man but, as is to be expected, she eventually comes around (especially after he shaves his beard) and realizes that he may be the real thing. Director Toni Marshall doesn’t do much with the predictable genre of romantic comedy except make the woman character older than the man. And at the core the film has the shallow generic premise about the nature of outer versus inner beauty. At times the film clearly seems to be influenced by the comedies of Pedro Almodóvar; especially with the use of crude humor, whimsical dialogue between the women of the salon and too with a number of humorously sexual situations. Nathalie Baye has been winning awards at film festivals all over the world for her spirited performance as the lonely but hopeful aging beauty and while it’s true her performance is strong, it’s also true that the movie’s mundane predictability keeps her role from greatness. - Matt Langdon |