Blanche comme neige (2019)
Directed by Anne Fontaine

Film Review

After immersing herself in two pretty bleak dramas - Les Innocents (2016) and Marvin (2017), director Anne Fontaine felt in need of some light relief.  Rather than making a return to traditional rom-com territory, she opted for something slightly different, a wacky feminist re-interpretation of a classic children's fairytale, Snow White.  Fontaine's idea of humour isn't, shall we say, of the conventional sort, so her take on the famous Grimm Brothers tale is bound to take most cinemagoers by surprise, especially if they were expecting something along the lines of the Walt Disney animation.

Fontaine's Snow White (that's Blanche-Neige to the French-speaking world) isn't a sweet dewy-eyed innocent but a sexually precocious dazzler about to wreak havoc in a household of seven men with more hang-ups than your average psychiatric clinic.  Never one to do things by halves, Fontaine throws just about every genre she can think of into the melting pot and comes up with a saucy black comedy with one hell of an identity crisis.  You could describe the film as an erotic coming-of-age comedy-thriller, but even that hardly does it justice. Blanche comme neige is an insanely thrown together potpourri that filches movie references with gay abandon (Hitchcock is ripped off left, right and centre) and leaves you wondering if it's high time that Anne Fontaine checked into the funny farm.

In her third collaboration with screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer (after Gemma Bovery and Les Innocentes), Fontaine delivers her zaniest film yet, although her well-meaning efforts are cruelly undermined by an obvious lack of restraint on both the writing and directing fronts.  In her desire to shock and surprise, Fontaine resorts to the kind of sensationalist crass inanity that has plagued mainstream French comedy for the past decade and most of the humour crashes to the floor like a large lead weight.  Although the manic plot manages to keep going, there are intervals where inspiration is distinctly lacking and it is only the imaginative flair that Fontaine brings to her mise-en-scène that prevents the whole thing from ending up as a hopelessly failed experiment.

Suitably cast as the super-sensual heroine is Lou de Laâge, stunning in a role that is a complete contrast to the one she had comfortably inhabited in Fontaine's earlier film Les Innocentes.  As Snow White's seven dwarfs are recast as men representing seven aspects of masculinity there's not much depth on the male side of the dramatis personae.  Most of the male characters are no more than two-dimensional ciphers, just as the dwarfs in the original tale are entirely summed up by their names.  The only two to stand out in the male chorus are Benoît Poelvoorde and Vincent Macaigne, although even they lack their usual crowdpulling appeal.

Most of the entertainment value is provided by Isabelle Huppert, who revels in the role of the wicked stepmother to such an extent that you can't help wondering if she, like Fontaine, is going slightly off the rails.  A generous dose of unbridled lunacy from Huppert and her director is, however, just what Blanche comme neige needs to hook the spectator and prevent the film from being merely a lunatic exercise in directorial self-harm.

Film Synopsis

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young woman named Claire who helped to run a luxury hotel with her stepmother Maud.  Claire was but a child when her darling father died, and now she lives with a vain and selfish woman who has become her deadliest enemy.  Maud has long been jealous of her stepdaughter's beauty and when the young woman steals the affections of her lover Bernard she decides the time has come to kill the detested rival.

A stranger comes to Claire's rescue and takes her to his modest abode in the country.  Here, the young woman is befriended by seven men who could not be more different: a hypochondriac cellist, an embittered vet, a sympathetic priest, a pair of twins, a lecherous bookseller and a shy karate enthusiast.  Not used to female company, the men have mixed feelings over admitting the vivacious young woman into their community.  For Claire it is the beginning of a whole new life, one of unbridled freedom...