Some friends took me to see this film in Helsinki. I really had no idea what to expect. The evening started, as evenings at the cinema do, with a series of trailers. There came what seemed to be a trailer for a French film featuring an ageing chanteuse (shades of a Gallic Madonna perhaps) performing in front of a young, hysterical audience. I thought that there was a film I would not go and see
and then it turned out it wasn't a trailer, but the start of the evening's main entertainment. The first five minutes set a scene, and a plot line appeared to be established. Not a particularly enthralling plot, perhaps, but something which might carry us along.
How wrong we were. The plot got stuck in a Paris hotel suite, and the characterisation wasn't even skin deep. The chanteuse Lauren, or Sylvia was a diva with problems. But not interesting problems, or dramatic problems; just time-consuming ones. She had some sort of artistic block. She sent a star-struck fan who had implausibly joined her entourage, Lucie, not to buy drugs, but to buy tampons. She was mobbed by fans, a strange and unconvincing mixture, who mostly looked like thirty-something resting actors told to wear something red and plastic. She had family problems of some sort. It was immensely boring. For all I know it perked up in its last forty minutes. But by then we were already in a nearby restaurant wondering why this film should have been made, let alone marketed, or rated by the critics.
There was one good line, when the diva's agent or boyfriend or whatever said that "she likes to appear wild, but underneath she's as dead as her stuffed deer" - a major feature of the hotel suite, which did indeed give a livelier performance than most of the cast. Let that be the epitaph for this exceptionally disappointing movie.
