16/03/2005 - Tout pour plaire, by Cécile Telerman, is an urban comedy depicting three friends, three sexy and successful women in their thirties, a quite novelty on the Old Continent

Tout pour plaire, first feature directed and written by the originally Belgian Cécile Telerman, will be released today on the French screens. This urban comedy depicting three friends, three sexy and successful women in their thirties, is quite a novelty on the Old Continent. Indeed, the way scenes and roles are organised, the witty dialogues, actually follow the patterns of a genre usually more characteristic of Anglo-Saxon productions.

The film focuses on the life-choices and disillusions of three Parisian women, Juliette (Mathilde Seigner), a lawyer whose sentimental life is as disorganised as her compulsive tendency to buy stuff she cannot afford, Marie (Judith Godrèche), a doctor who carries out successfully both her work and family life, for she is the one feeding her husband the painter and their two children, and Florence (Anne Parillaud), as soft as her name suggests, who silently obeys her busy husband as well as her narcissistic boss. Denial, perfection, and acceptance : each heroin embodies a different attitude towards life. The film consists in an alternation of scenes from the protagonists’ separate lives, and scenes where the three of them gather and chill out. Far from being caricatural, the gallery of portraits is rather refined. Each character builds up gradually, as a complex mechanics operating while the story unfolds —this phenomenon is explicitely pointed at in the script itself through the changing perception we and the characters have of the bank advisor. This technique, which relies mostly on the actors’ talents, distinguishes this very feminine, gently shot and warmly lit work from a manifest made of easy feminist clichés. In fact, each character, male or female, has something endearing. As a result, the film grows on you, which makes it easy to fully enjoy the lovely trio and laugh at Mathilde Seigner’s daring and witty repartee.

Tout pour plaire, coproduced by the French companies La Mouche du Coche Films and Les Films de la Greluche with the participation of France 3 Cinéma and, in Belgium, Saga Film and RTL, is supported by the French CNC. Its distributor, Diaphana Distribution, chose to circulate 318 copies.

(Translated from French)