Copacabana (2010)
Directed by Marc Fitoussi

Film Review

Marc Fitoussi's follow-up to his thoroughly engaging debut feature La Vie d'artiste (2007) is a similarly waspish satire on contrasting life styles which offers French cinema diva Isabelle Huppert her best comedic role to date.  After the intense dramatic performances she gave in Benoît Jacquot's Villa Amalia (2009) and Claire Denis's White Material (2010), Copacabana must have come as a welcome therapy to an actress who is famously renowned for playing maverick females with a penchant for the perverse.  Fitoussi claims he created the role of Babou, the archetypal middle-aged adolescent, specifically for Huppert, and this might explain why the actress inhabits the part so perfectly and gives it so much oomph.

Babou may be a force of nature, contemptuous of authority and totally incapable of assuming any responsibility in her life (including supporting her daughter), but she is someone we can readily identify with and, to some extent, admire.  Not for her the jaded hypocrisies of bourgeois morality and the blinkered self-interest which separates the middle-classes from those at the lower end of the social spectrum.  Babou is a free spirit who just cannot help acting on impulse.  The same woman who casually trashes a chocolate shop when she is turned down for a job is also capable of exceptional acts of generosity, as well as those of outright folly.  She serves as a kind of litmus paper for the society in which she exists, one that shows up the extent of the moral deficiency of those less honest and compassionate individuals who cross her path.  It is a role that is tailor-made for Huppert and she gives it her best shot, making Babou a complex character who is both engaging and yet frustratingly indefinable - a charming paradox.

Playing the part of Babou's more level-headed daughter is Huppert's real-life daughter Lolita Chammah.  Huppert and Chammah had previously appeared together on screen in Claude Chabrol's Une Affaire de femmes (1988) and Laurence Ferreira Barbosa's La Vie moderne (2000) and they make an astonishing contrast, not just physically but also in the way they project their very different personalities, Huppert a natural tragicomic extrovert, Chammah the cold and restrained ingénue.  It is evident that the two women have an emotional bond, but it is just as apparent they are separated by a gulf that they appear unable to bridge.  Of course it may simply be that Huppert and Chammah are immensely talented actors, but you do sense that they are revealing something of their own relationship in the film, much as Gérard and Guillaume Depardieu did in Jacob Berger's Aime ton père (2002).

Copacabana isn't quite up to the high standard of Fitoussi's previous film - many of the secondary characters are a tad too clichéd and the pace is a little uneven in parts - but, thanks mainly to Huppert's arresting central performance, it makes an effective and enjoyable social satire.  It probably isn't the best advertisement that the Belgian town of Ostend could have hoped for (it'll probably set the town's tourist industry back by at least fifty years), and it doesn't do much for those who earn their crust selling timeshare apartments (other than to expose the cynical brutality of the industry they work for).  But as a king-sized dollop of good-natured entertainment, elegantly laced with a piquant sauce of barbed social commentary, it certainly hits the mark.

Film Synopsis

Babou is one of life's eternal adolescents.  Unable to hold down a job for more than five minutes, she has spent the last few years travelling around the world doing what she does best: enjoying herself.  When she finally returns to France, she cannot understand why her daughter Esméralda is so antagonistic towards her.  She is even more surprised when Esméralda tells her she is about to get married and has no intention of inviting her to the wedding.  In a desperate attempt to win back her daughter's respect, Babou gets herself a job selling timeshare apartments in the grim coastal town of Ostend.  By using her initiative, Babou makes an impression on her superiors and soon lands a cushy promotion, to the disgust of her more experienced colleagues.  When she sees a young homeless couple living on the street, Babou cannot prevent herself from letting them spend the night in one of the apartments she is charged with selling.  Naturally, her employers are not impressed by this gesture of charity...