Alain Guiraudie is emerging as a distinctive, perplexing, even exasperating film-maker. In a 20-year career in French cinema, he has long had a soft spot for the playful, the anarchic and the fantastical. Yet maybe we outside France were misled by his outlier hit in 2013, Stranger By the Lake. This was the film with which Guiraudie made his sensational international breakthrough: a gripping homoerotic cruising thriller. This was my own introduction to his work and perhaps it was the atypically serious tone of that which caused me to be disconcerted by the directionless silliness of his follow-up Rester Vertical, or Staying Vertical, in 2016.
Now here is a semi-comic social satire or whimsy; or a jeu d’esprit whose esprit is difficult to locate. It has various themes and ideas which Guiraudie seems unable to take seriously and be successfully funny about. It is a weird caper which comports itself as realist drama, while also laboriously tipping us the wink about its obvious absurdity. The setting is Clermont-Ferrand in central France, where Médéric (Jean-Charles Clichet) is a software designer, a tubby, schlubby guy in his mid-30s who lives alone. We see him one afternoon looking entranced at a total stranger in the street with whom he has evidently fallen in love: Isadora (Noémie Lvovsky) a woman in her 50s who sells sex. He brazenly approaches her, declaring that he wants to make love to her without paying, because that is beneath him.
