Chinese Puzzle

Film (2013)

With Romain Duris (Xavier Rousseau), Audrey Tautou (Martine), Cécile De France (Isabelle), Kelly Reilly (Wendy), Sandrine Holt (Ju), Flore Bonaventura (Isabelle de Groote – la babysitter), Jochen Hägele (Hegel et Schopenhauer – les philosophes allemands)

The French title of this film is Casse-tête Chinois, which has a double meaning, both as chinese puzzle or brain teaser, but also as headache. The film, indeed, depicts a personal conundrum of magnificent proportions, but it is also important to see the head-throbbingness of it to get the full flavor.

Made by the same director as L’Auberge Espagnol (2002), the story of a gathering of offbeat people in a house in Barcelona, this film is an account of an itinerant, rather than a localized, nuttiness.

Xavier (Romain Duris) is a forty-year old French father whose American wife ups and returns to a lover in New York, carrying along both their children. Devoted to his kids, Xavier goes to New York to be near them, and begins a series of complex interactions that will enable him to stay. Trying to get married to someone for the purpose of remaining in the country becomes one of the goals, and it brings with it a connection to a female gay couple with whom Xavier becomes sigificantly involved.

There is considerably more complication and much of it is funny. Xavier’s shyster storefront lawyer, who operates on the knife-edge of legality, is an act unto himself.

And then, of course, there is Martine (Audrey Tautou), another French mother on the run with whom Xavier had an involvement before his marriage. How things develop between these two old lover-friends creates the emotional core of the film.

There are a lot of cinematic curiosities; interviews with the philosophers Hegel and Schopenhauer, interspersed among everything else, are just an example of the odd and sometimes interesting turns taken by the director. I didn’t find these swerves particularly illuminating, but they were charmingly off the rails; I did see how one might regard them as distracting. In Amélie (2001), cinematic flights of fancy were able to create a sense of magic. Here they intrude a bit for whatever reason but not enough to distract from the story.

Duris and Tautou make a great pair. Someone else has recognized this because they will soon appear together again in Mood Indigo (2014). They both have a distracted, romantic charm, each assuringly spacey, a little weird and adorably vulnerable. French cinema has always been great at providing appealing stars who have an appeal that comes at an angle: Daniel Auteuil, Gerard Depardieu, Charlotte Gainsbourg among them. Duris and Tautou, especially together, fit nicely within that lineup.

That gentle peculiarity, set against the rambling jostle of this film, makes for a jangling that somehow gets held together by an impressionistic flow. Some might find it a bit too gooey. I found its sweet and slightly piquant offsets an appealing combination.

– BADMan