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Let It Rain
Sep. 6th, 2018 07:00 amEver since I saw Look at Me for the first time more than a decade ago, I’ve meant see more of Agnes Jaoui’s movies, and at last I saw another one: Let It Rain.
It wasn’t worth the wait.
Actually, that’s too stark. The movie has many enjoyable elements, not least a graciously sized French house with a gorgeous garden where the characters eat an enormous fruit plate with two bottles of wine. (“Why don’t we have a gorgeous fruit plate and two bottles of wine?” I complained to Julie, so we broke out a bottle of rosé.)
But the film as a whole didn’t come together for me. In Look at Me, almost all the characters are deeply flawed, but you come to care about them a great deal anyway - particularly young Lolita and her singing teacher, Sylvie. In Let It Rain, they’re still deeply flawed, but the movie doesn’t quite manage that magic alchemy where you love them anyway and root for them even as they sabotage themselves. Instead you watch them sabotage themselves and you’re like “I don’t know you quite well enough to know why that was inevitable, but it’s hard to care when I can see it was totally self-inflicted.”
In fact, this fact that we don’t come to know the characters quite as well is probably at the root of the problem. When Lolita sabotages her new relationship because she’s convinced that people are interested in her only in order to use her as a conduit to her famous father, you want to shake her - but also to give her a big hug, because oh Lolita honey. Whereas when Karim edges toward cheating on his wife, who seems like a perfectly nice person, then it’s just like… why? Why are you doing this?
I still want to see more of her films, though. Every filmmaker deserves to be forgiven at least one dud, and in any case Look at Me is so good that it’s surely earned Jaoui a second chance.
It wasn’t worth the wait.
Actually, that’s too stark. The movie has many enjoyable elements, not least a graciously sized French house with a gorgeous garden where the characters eat an enormous fruit plate with two bottles of wine. (“Why don’t we have a gorgeous fruit plate and two bottles of wine?” I complained to Julie, so we broke out a bottle of rosé.)
But the film as a whole didn’t come together for me. In Look at Me, almost all the characters are deeply flawed, but you come to care about them a great deal anyway - particularly young Lolita and her singing teacher, Sylvie. In Let It Rain, they’re still deeply flawed, but the movie doesn’t quite manage that magic alchemy where you love them anyway and root for them even as they sabotage themselves. Instead you watch them sabotage themselves and you’re like “I don’t know you quite well enough to know why that was inevitable, but it’s hard to care when I can see it was totally self-inflicted.”
In fact, this fact that we don’t come to know the characters quite as well is probably at the root of the problem. When Lolita sabotages her new relationship because she’s convinced that people are interested in her only in order to use her as a conduit to her famous father, you want to shake her - but also to give her a big hug, because oh Lolita honey. Whereas when Karim edges toward cheating on his wife, who seems like a perfectly nice person, then it’s just like… why? Why are you doing this?
I still want to see more of her films, though. Every filmmaker deserves to be forgiven at least one dud, and in any case Look at Me is so good that it’s surely earned Jaoui a second chance.
