Mon Homme . Newcity Chicago . 04-06-98

Mon Homme

DIRECTED BY: Bertrand Blier

REVIEWED: 04-06-98

A young woman sits at a counter along the marble hall of a Paris shopping center. Barry White murmurs on the soundtrack. Cut closer. Short black hair freshly chewed, black lace bustier looming from her blouse. Cut closer. Barry growls, music starts, she bends her long leg, black-stockinged, high-heeled, a prostitute tempting a bourgeois passerby to try selling her sex. Writer-director Bertrand Blier is a career provocateur, hoping to unsettle in his placid-looking yet roguish and raunchy stories such as "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs," "Too Beautiful For You" and "Menage." Blier's later movies are shot in elegant widescreen, capturing sleek decors in which his rebellious bourgeois learn to shed their inhibitions. But they're more than perfume ads with naughty, naughty thoughts. As embodied by Anouk Grinberg, a Blier regular, Marie is an exquisite tramp, both dominant and submissive, a character who's ethereally happy with her chosen profession, yet who is equally likely to discourse on the joy of fucking for pay as the niceties of a simple family life. Check her silky sarcasm on lines like "Is being a whore fun? Joy. Pure Joy." And "I've got a happy mind and a happy ass and a healthy bank balance." Marie says she sells "love, real love, pure love," takes in a bum as her pimp, measures the needs of the oh-so-needy men she meets. Gorecki plays when she spreads her legs. Blier is deadpan to the finish. 95m.

--Ray Pride

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Mon Homme
Mon Homme

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