Le Sourire (1994)
Directed by Claude Miller

Film Review

It may have started out as an honest, well-meaning attempt to confront some of the less savoury aspects of human sexuality, but Le Sourire fails to have even the faintest ring of truth about it.  The least satisfying of all Claude Miller's films, it is a chore to watch and leaves a very nasty aftertaste.  The fault lies not in the story premise, a tragicomic tale of a man at death's door making one last frantic bid to sate his carnal appetites with a young woman who takes pleasure in arousing geriatrics, but in its clumsy, almost haphazard execution.  The characters are too thinly drawn to be convincing and Miller diverts our attention away from them, going from the specific to the general, by attempting something along the lines of a sociological documentary involving anonymous strip tease artists and their lusting on-lookers.  The result is a vague, sordid mess that does nothing to engage our feelings or our interest.

Were it not for Jean-Pierre Marielle's typically committed performance Le Sourire would have virtually nothing to commend it.  Neither Emmanuelle Seigner nor Richard Bohringer appears remotely interested in what they are doing and some of the supporting cast are so bad you wonder why they ever took up acting.  Miller aggravates the failings of a weak screenplay by indulging in some pretty grotesque flights of fancy, none of which help the film's coherence and credibility.  With the camera fixed for far too long on naked and semi-naked striptease performers like a gob-smacked adolescent the film risks being mistaken for a tacky piece of 1990s erotica.  Uneven, shallow and at times hopelessly pretentious, this is Claude Miller's biggest misfire, a film that delivers only the smallest fraction of what it promises. The curious thing is that the director made it between two of his most inspired films, L'Accompagnatrice (1992) and La Classe de neige (1998).

Film Synopsis

Pierre François Le Clainche is a sixty-something neuro-psychiatrist who has just survived a near-fatal heart attack.  Against the advice of his heart-specialist, who is also his wife, he decides to throw caution to the wind and embark on one last mad love affair with a younger woman.  Odile is just what he needs to return some colour to his drab, meaningless life, but the young woman is not keen to get involved with the older man.  Undeterred, Pierre persists and soon lures Odile into a wild adventure.  If you're going to go, you might as well go out with a bang...