Look At Me (DVD)

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It's easy to see why "Look at Me" won an award for Best Screenplay at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri pooled their talents to create an intelligent and sensitive comedy of bad manners that contains strains of a number of recognizable plots. But with interesting and complex characters, they feel brand new:

There's the overweight daughter who craves attention, mostly from her father, and the story of how she tries to curry his favor.

There's the story of a famous writer whose celebrity has swelled his head, clouded his judgment, and no doubt dragged him into a malaise that's hardly conducive to writing.

There's the story of an up-and-coming writer who craves that kind of success, but has to suck up to the famous writer in order to get it.

There's the story of a voice teacher who, like everyone else, has the impulse to use the daughter to get to her famous writer-father—but eventually regrets that impulse and tries to develop an honest relationship with the girl.

There's the story of the writer's exceptionally young wife who competes for his affections and time with his older daughter, and the inevitable strain it places on all of them.

And there's the story of an idealistic young man who wants to succeed on his own terms, and who's attracted to the slightly overweight daughter because of who she is, not who her famous father is. Not a whole lot actually happens, but our attention is drawn to the way these characters live their lives.

Etienne Cassard (Bacri) is so famous and so used to being fawned over that he thinks and acts like he's the center of the universe—so much so that he doesn't seem to respond to his daughter, even when he spends time with her. Marilou Berry is wonderfully pathetic as the ironically named Lolita, the overweight daughter who despises models and beautiful people, but has aspirations of her own . . . which, again, her father doesn't seem to notice.

The film opens with a postmodern tip-of-the-hat to self-referentiality: a darkened screen, with the spoken words in French (with English subtitles), "Can we start?" Then, "Exhale," and we're in the middle of one of Lolita's singing lessons, where she's coached by Sylvia (Jaoui). It's clear from Sylvia's body language that she thinks Lolita's "instrument" is marginal at best, and she seems on the verge of always losing patience with her mediocre student, or telling the woman she should give it up and try her hand at painting. In fact, Lolita seems to sense this as well. She's a perceptive woman through whose eyes we feel judgments of the self-centered behavior that has become endemic around her—especially in the circles I which she's accustomed to traveling with her father. Make that "tagging along," for as with the eager rock reporter in "Almost Famous," Lolita finds herself barred from entering one club through the VIP entrance after she lags behind to talk on the phone, and her father doesn't notice. To be that large and that transparent is a double annoyance for her.

Though the camera focuses on Etienne and the people whose lives orbit around him, this is really Lolita's story—so much so that it might have been named "Lolita" if her father had a fraction as much of an interest in her as Humbert Humbert did in Nabokov's novel. And the surprise for Lolita is that she has the same sort of devious and manipulative moments as her self-centered father.