Elle l'adore (2014)
Directed by Jeanne Herry

Film Review

Just how far will a fan go to save the object of her infatuation?  That's the question that first-time director Jeanne Herry poses in this schizoid, noir-tinted comedy-thriller, a film that, despite its ample tomfoolery, offers a darkly incisive commentary on the phenomenon of fan obsession.  The worst excess of fandom is presumably something that Herry knows a great deal about, being the offspring of not one but two French cultural icons, the actress Miou-Miou and singer Julien Clerc.  Her own experience of the less wholesome side of celebrity life adds weight to her first film and makes it far more interesting than it might otherwise have been.  Elle l'adore is an awkward comedy that never quite manages to draw its disparate elements into a satisfying whole, but what makes it worthwhile is its darkly humorous but authentic characterisation of the mutual dependency of two extremely flawed categories of individual, the self-loving celebrity and his devoted follower.

It may sound, on the face of it, to be mainstream comedy mush but Herry defies our expectations and comes up with something feisty and original.  The film's main strength is the realism that it invests in its two main protagonists.  These start start out as familiar archetypes but become somewhat more substantial as the film progresses, thanks in part to the writing, but mostly on account of the performances of the talented lead actors.  Sandrine Kiberlain (L'Oiseau) is supremely well-cast as the mythomaniac fan Muriel.  Being one of those rare actresses who is equally at home in frothy comedy and trenchantly realist drama, she is particularly well-suited for this kind of wacky cinematic hybrid, providing the necessary adhesive to hold it all together.  Laurent Lafitte (Papa ou maman, Boomerang) ) is just as convincing as the narcissistic singer who exploits Kiberlain's compulsive devotion to get him out of a very tight spot, and manages to give at least the illusion of depth to a fairly predictable, one-dimensional character.  Kiberlain and Lafitte become the unlikeliest partners in crime, two wilfully deluded fantasists whose symbiotic relationship is as disturbing as it is amusing.

Providing a comic counterpoint to the mutually parasitic Muriel-Lafitte relationship is a pair of hopelessly inept homicide detectives who spend more time squabbling like a married couple en route for an acrimonious divorce than doing any actual detecting.  Pascal Demolon and Olivia Cote are a Marmite-like accessory to an already over-seasoned bouillabaisse - you will either love them or hate them as the endlessly bickering duo, although Demolon's scenes with Kiberlain are irresistibly funny and make their inclusion worthwhile.  As the film's main raison d'être is the creative fall-out from destructive relationships, the Demolon-Cote comedy double act serves as en effective counterbalance to the much darker dependency between Muriel and Lafitte.

The excellence of the performances cannot quite disguise the mechanical nature of the plot, which becomes glaringly apparent in the tidily resolved final act.  Having challenged our initial preconceptions, the central characters revert pretty well to type to facilitate a nice tidy ending, a cop out that takes the gloss off what might have been a far more daringly ironic production.  Elle l'adore is far more satisfying than its premise might suggest but it falls short of its potential and leaves you wishing that its authors had dug a little deeper into what is abundantly fertile ground for both comedy and drama.  Contrived and patchy as it is, Jeanne Herry's debut feature still manages to be an enjoyably demented black comedy.  You might have expected a shallow morality tale or a predictably lame send-up of fan obsession, but Elle l'adore is neither of these.  It is a film that gets under the skin of the diehard fan and her celebrity idol, making fun of the strangest of human dichotomies - a need both to venerate and be venerated.

Film Synopsis

Muriel is a beautician who likes nothing better than to gossip and weave fanciful stories.  For the past twenty years, she has been a dedicated fan of the pop singer Vincent Lacroix.   She has been to all his concerts and has all his records, so there isn't much space for anything else in her life.  Imagine then her disbelief when, one night, her idol turns up on her doorstep unexpectedly and solicits her help in disposing of a dead body.  It is the beginning of a fantastic adventure that not even Muriel could have invented...