Bazar (2009)
Directed by Patricia Plattner

Film Review

Seven years after Bernadette Lafont's first collaboration with Patricia Plattner, Les Petites couleurs (2002), the actress and director are reunited to offer up another ironic slice-of-life about the travails of being a woman in the 21st century.  This time, Lafont takes centre stage in a familiar May to December romantic situation, playing a feisty sixty-something antiques dealer who falls for a handsome 25-year-old man, sympathetically played by Pio Marmaï.  Bazar has little in the way of originality and ambition, but it treads its well-worn ground with great charm and breathes considerable warmth and conviction into its slightly implausible scenario, thanks mainly to Lafont's lively screen presence.

A gentle anti-ageist comedy, Bazar challenges our assumptions about relationships across the generational divide but falls short of saying anything too fresh and provocative.   Apart from giving romantically starved grannies a cheap thrill, it is hard to divine what motivated Plattner to make the film.  Plattner's cinema is patently female-centric, so it's no surprise that once again her female protagonists are far more convincingly drawn and likeable than the male characters, most of whom appear caricatured and slightly detached from the drama.   Fortunately, some inspired casting helps (partly) to correct this imbalance.

Bernadette Lafont had just turned seventy when she made this film, but you'd hardly guess as much, such is the vitality she brings to her performance, which so easily evokes her early years as a wild young thing in the films of the French New Wave.  Lafont will always be remembered as one of the most non-conformist and unpredictable of French actresses, and her engaging portrayal of a sexagenarian falling for a well-built hunk who is less than half her age can only reinforce this impression.

Much of the film's poignancy lies in the fact that Lafont looks her age but so clearly still has the spirit of a rebellious teenager - a reminder of the sad fact of life that inwardly we never really age; it is only our bodies that grow old and wither.  This is brought home in some touching scenes involving Lafont's character and her daughter (a magnificent Lou Doillon) - the roles appear to be reversed and it is the daughter who attempts to correct the wayward adolescent tendencies of her mother.

Pio Marmaï's brooding, introspective persona (we never really get to understand what his character thinks or feels) makes an effective contrast with Lafont's outgoing vivacity.  It is only some weaknesses in Patricia Plattner's script which prevents the two very capable actors from giving the film the emotional punch it needs to be genuinely memorable.  Without Lafont's feisty presence, Bazar risks being intolerably anaemic and vacuous.  Bernadette Lafont may be in her eighth decade, but she's still got what it takes - charisma and energy enough to enliven any humdrum little film.  Long may she continue to do so.

Film Synopsis

Sixty-year-old Gabrielle is passionate about her work as an antiques dealer.  It is her life, her raison d'être, and so she is understandably shaken when she is evicted from her shop.  How ironic that this should happen on the same day that she becomes a grandmother!  But just when Gabrielle thinks her life is over, a gorgeous 25-year-old Portuguese man named Fred suddenly takes her fancy.  It should be impossible, but Cupid fires his arrow and the unlikely pair cannot help falling in love...