April 28-May 4, 2005

movies

Mirror Images

my father the hero: Jean-Pierre Bacri and Marilou Berry as Look at Me's father and daughter.

A novelist's self-absorption is echoed by those around him.

Look at Me

by Cindy Fuchs

Centered on the fraught relationship between aspiring actor/singer Lolita (Marilou Berry) and her celebrity novelist father Étienne (co-writer Jean-Pierre Bacri), Look at Me is a study of fame, family, selfishness, and especially the ways that desire and resentment can come to color all. Desperately wanting her father's attention, Lolita works hard at her singing with the help of her teacher, Sylvia (co-writer and director Agnés Jaoui), who remains mostly uninterested in the girl until she learns her father's identity. At this point, the well-meaning Sylvia perks up; her husband, Pierre (Laurent Grévill), is a novelist who needs a break. As his last book was published years before, Pierre is feeling sorry for himself, like a "kept husband." Sylvia decides to exploit her relationship with Lolita to advance his career.

It's all too familiar to Lolita: Everyone she meets uses her to get to her father. Her sometime "boyfriend" slips her materials to hand off while casually bringing other girls along on their dates. Because she wants so much to be seen by someone, Lolita puts up with it, but it only reinforces her understanding of the world, namely, that it revolves around her dad. It doesn't help that Étienne agrees; he offhandedly calls her his "big girl" and regularly comments on the prettier girls who sing with her.

Awarded the prize for best screenplay at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Look at Me makes repeated and careful interrelations among insecurities. Lolita has been negotiating her father's self-absorption for so long that she assumes it even as she rails against it. Yet the hierarchy of carelessness and egotism remains complex in this refreshingly unsentimental film, even extending to Sylvia, who might appear at first to be a moral center, as she does chastise Étienne for his cruelty to Lolita. But Sylvia makes some cutting remarks and decisions of her own, sometimes out of allegiance to Pierre, but sometimes to shore up her own self-worth at someone else's expense. It's this intricacy of impulses and needs, feeble efforts to connect and vengeful plots that makes Look at Me so unusual as social satire and familial comedy. By the time Étienne himself suffers a loss — however briefly — it seems less "just deserts" than more of the same.

While Étienne's fame shapes the film's array of contentions and conflicts, it's more a symptom than a cause of the profound loss that organizes everyone's expectations. While Lolita lives in his seeming shadow, she works hard, if not precisely consciously, to replicate the pain of this relationship in others, whether she plays her father's role or her own. Whether she comes to see this in herself is left somewhat open in Look at Me. And that's ironic and appropriate, too.

Look at Me Directed by Agnès Jaoui A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz Five recommended