When somebody pulls their dick out in the first five minutes of a film, it’s equivalent to someone pulling their dick out in the first five minutes of a date. Usually, people are still eating at that stage of either activity, and civilized people wait until after dinner to unpack their genitals. The opening scene of Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule put me off my bowl of Kashi.
That said, I quite enjoyed this movie, in which the Marquis de Malavoy travels to the court of Louis XVI to try and get government aid to drain his swampland, which is causing his peasants to die of mosquito-born pestilence. In Louis’ court, aid goes to the wittiest (frankly, I can think of worse systems of influence), and while Malavoy gets some good bits out initially, he is ultimately unsuccessful in his mission. He does, however, manage to pick up a young bride with the biggest freaking breasts I’ve ever seen, and also nail a hot countess in the meantime (without alienating his intended), so, not a bad month’s work overall.
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Danielle Thompson’s Avenue Montaigne also features a young innocent wading into a cultural hotbed and shining a pure, fresh light upon it. But whereas Ridicule is about wit and intrigue in court politics, Avenue Montaigne explores the relationship between wealth and the arts (a subject that personally interests me).
It’s an old story: if you are in the arts, you are poor. The arts get funding from people who’ve spent their lives making money (well, and from the government). People who’ve spent their lives making money do not understand or appreciate truly good art, because they are not in the arts – they are in business. Thus, we are surrounded by crap, and art becomes a big-ticket luxury item enjoyed almost entirely by wealthy, out-of-touch bluehairs. The people in the social demographics art is trying to reach can’t afford to get anywhere near it. This movie does a good job of illustrating all this in an entertaining way, if you ignore the fact that the naïve-outside-observer figure (who serves as the central touchpoint for the stories of the various artists) falls in love immediately and for no conceivable reason with a total asshole, and asks nothing further from life, which seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the film.
…AND BUT THEN, after writing the above, I read a few reviews of Avenue Montaigne, and apparently, it’s meant to be simply a frothy romantic comedy, and I completely misinterpreted it. Well, it’s not the first time I’ve read far more into a movie than is meant to be there. I blame A.P. English classes back in high school.
