Les Yeux jaunes des crocodiles (2014)
Directed by Cécile Telerman

Film Review

Cécile Telerman's adaptation of Katherine Pancol's 2006 best selling novel Les Yeux jaunes des crocodiles has been one of the most eagerly anticipated French films of 2014 but it falls way short of expectations.  The film's dazzling cast is certainly a powerful lure that few French film aficionados will have the will to resist but, as we all know. a great cast doesn't necessarily mean a great film.  Telerman's film is pedestrian at just about every level and any subtlety or barbed irony in Pancol's book is curiously absent in this lukewarm adaptation.  With every character reduced to the most egregious kind of one-dimensional caricature you could, if you tried, interpret the film as a canny spoof of the kind of vapid comedy that cash-flow conscious directors have been serving up over the past decade on both sides of the Atlantic.  Unfortunately, the film isn't even as clever as that.  It's just a shallow page-to-screen transposition totally lacking in substance and deeper meaning.

Insipid as the film is, there is still enough star power behind it to make it worth watching (just), although you have to wonder what induced actors of the calibre of Emmanuelle Béart and Julie Depardieu to lend their names such a bland and lazily concocted comedy.  Forced to play hideously one-sided archetypes (one an egoistical society belle, the other a financially strapped academic), it is these two leading ladies who come off worst.   In their supporting roles, Jacques Weber and Patrick Bruel have more freedom to make their characters a little more convincing and manage to knock some real human feeling (or at least the semblance of such) into the proceedings.  Through their combined efforts, the impeccable cast come close to salvaging a comedy misfire, but, sad to say, it is the breathtaking mediocrity of the writing and direction that win out in the end.

Film Synopsis

This is the story of two sisters who could not be more different.  Joséphine, a historian who specialises in the twelfth century, is struggling to cope with life's challenges.  Iris, astonishingly good-looking, leads a dissipated and comfortable life in Paris.  One evening, at a dinner party, Iris boasts that she has written a novel.  The lie backfires and she ends up having to ask her sister to write the book under her name, so that Iris can pass herself off as a published author.  Crippled with debts after her husband walked out on her, Joséphine is easily persuaded to accept her sister's unusual commission.  The book proves to be a bestseller and will massively transform the two women's lives.