Marie-Francine: Valérie Lemercier in freewheeling (review)

Back to basics for Valérie Lemercier, four years after the failure of 100% Cachemire.

Valerie Lemercier returns to TF1, this Wednesday evening, with the broadcast of Marie-Francinehis comedy released in theaters in 2017.

The pitch? At 50, dumped by her husband who left for a younger woman, Marie-Francine must return to live with her parents. At work, things are no better: she is considered too old and she is threatened with reassignment. Living with her parents is becoming unbearable. Marie-Francine cannot stand that they try to rehouse her with men who do not attract her for a second. In a small cigarette shop that she now runs, she meets the charming Miguel, a charming cook who is in the same situation as her. Despite the circumstances, they try to live their budding love…

With Aline, Valérie Lemercier tries something new: the fan biopic (review)

In the spring of 2017, Valérie Lemercier confided in First that the reception murders 100% Cashmere had traumatized her. This comedy, as acid as it was serious (she played a woman stubbornly refusing motherhood), was undoubtedly too serious for her audience, who were nevertheless accustomed to her humor and her deeply offbeat personality. Could she have sworn to herself that she would never be caught out again? With Marie-Francinethe actress and director is in any case not taking any risks. She has written herself a tailor-made character of a wealthy bourgeois woman in full disarray, forced to go and live with her parents after a separation from her unfaithful husband and the loss of her job. Tanguy meets Back to my mother’s house.

100% Cashmere: How Valérie Lemercier Lost Control of Her Film

On rails

The parable is obvious: Marie-Francine who drags her feet back home is Lemercier doing a Chatiliez in tipsy aristocrat mode, which is precisely where we expect him. Val is back, still as out of it, still as quick to imitate a milieu she knows well with its distant and conservative snob characters, its worldly manners and its seriousness. We laugh sometimes, a little by reflex (of class), a little out of loyalty to Lemercier who puts on a show with his usual sense of self-mockery. Then, the gentle purring, not unpleasant, becomes a snoring when Marie-Francine meets a prole cook played by Patrick Timsit from whom she hides her condition. The potentially explosive encounter between the two best comic triggers of the 90s is unfortunately spoiled by Lemercier’s desire to favor the effectiveness of the romcom over the ambiguity of social satire. The film will not recover from it, which is not going to make us happy. We even hope that Val will reconnect with success to move towards crazier projects and in line with his causticity surrounded by tenacious melancholy.

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