Australian review

Movie Review: Beautiful Lies MARK NAGLAZAS, The West Australian July 21, 2011

Beautiful Lies (M) 3.5 stars

Audrey Tautou, Nathalie Baye, Sami Bouajila

Director Pierre Slavadori

You'll like this if you liked Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Amelie, Priceless, Heartbreaker

In this era of the SMS message and the tweet, when an expression of love can be reduced to what amounts to a pin number, it's refreshing to have a romantic comedy that turns on a beautifully composed letter.

Certainly, it may not be credible. If a smitten young man in the real world communicated his feelings for a woman in the way Sami Bouajila's Jean does in the French romantic comedy Beautiful Lies she would probably have to have it translated by a specialist in medieval literature.

But as a device for causing romantic confusion and chaos nothing tops the anonymous love letter, which stirs up desire and longing and romantic mystery in a way that an anonymous email simply will not (send such a thing and you could have the police confiscating your computer).

Set in a gorgeous, sun-kissed port city in the south of France (it's not named but it will get travel junkies googling), Beautiful Lies opens with Bouajila's timid beauty salon handyman and helper Jeancomposing a beautiful love letter to the owner of the business, the brash, somewhat insensitive Emilie (Audrey Tautou).

Emilie assumes the letter is from one of her elderly customers and tosses it into the bin, leaving Jean devastated. How will he ever be able to express his feelings for a woman who barely notices his existence?

After another depressing encounter with her mother Maddy (Nathalie Baye) - who is still in a funk after separating from her artist husband of many years - Emilie retrieves the crumpled love letter from the bin, retypes it and sends it off to the housebound, bedraggled older woman.

The letter has a transformative effect on Maddy, who discards the dressing gown and slippers, makes use of Emilie's salon and starts sauntering around town in hope that the anonymous admirer will make himself known.

The truth comes out, of course, but in the clever, twisty fashion we have come to expect of writer-director Pierre Salvadori, a specialist in the kind of sophisticated romantic comedies that harken back to Hollywood's Golden Age and, especially, the films of Ernst Lubitsch. It is this old-school delicacy that enables Salvadori to walk a very fine line between farce and contrived fluff - in what universe does a beauty salon hire a strapping heterosexual hunk to fold towels and change lightbulbs? - and something more grounded and meaningful.

Apart from his non-prudish approach to love and sex Salvadori's best decision is in casting two wonderful dramatic actors in Bouajila and Baye alongside the always delightful Tautou, with whom he worked in the 2006 hit Priceless.

The wonderfully handsome French-Arabic star Bouajila brings the kind of gracefulness and gravitas that recalls black American actors Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington to his part of Jean, whose qualities are initially unseen by the frantic, self-involved Emilie.

And the great Baye, who is little known here but a major star in France, manages to play a slightly sex-crazed older women without ever tumbling into caricature, a major achievement at a time when any female over the age of 45 is depicted as an object of pity and ridicule (and she is the hottest 63-year-old you'll ever see, Helen Mirren notwithstanding).

Of course, Salvadori wraps things up a little too neatly and conveniently. But this can be forgiven because the journey is so smooth and so elegant and Tautou, whose Emilie is a cracked-mirror version of her iconic Amelie, so charming and so believable in her mood-swinging mix of the selfless and selfish.