My Wife is an Actress
(Ma femme est une actrice)
Directed by and starring Yvan Attal.
Also starring Charlotte Gainbourg and Terence Stamp.
What price fame? This film does not deal with hapless actors destroyed by their own success but rather the tribulations endured by their intimates. Charlotte is a film star who accepts her fame with good humour, even enjoying it. Her husband is Yvan, a sports journalist. He is increasingly annoyed at the way the world treats his wife with fascinated reverence: full restaurants magically find them tables, dinners are interrupted by autograph hunters, and so on. When Charlotte goes to London to make a film with the famous actor — and notorious ladies-man — John (Terence Stamp), Yvan is consumed by suspicion that her world of acting — particularly the sex-scenes — has become too real for her.
The film’s theme, the relationship between image and reality and its impact on individuals, is a serious one. The opening montage of 1930s fabuleux femmes in their most austere and smouldering poses alludes to it nicely. But the seriousness of the jealousy and paranoia that threaten the marriage is cleverly offset by the film’s humour. This is, first and foremost, a funny film. The tone is slightly uneven, varying from understated humour to virtual slapstick, and is occasionally off-colour. Yvan’s and Charlotte’s marriage is thrown into relief by the otherwise unremarkable subplot of the ‘normal’, constantly bickering, marriage of Yvan’s self-consciously Jewish sister and her non-religious husband.
Yvan and Charlotte are, in fact, married — but it would be a gross invasion of privacy to speculate on their relationship. Next time I see a famous actor I shall try not to gawp at them.
(I can recommend the Alliance Française’s champagne.)
Guy
