This is Josie Balasko in her 'Ma Vies est un enfer' mode or wearing what some viewers will choose to call her 'vulgar' hat. A once-over-lightly of the plot will explain why. Alain Chabat and Ticky Holgado are estate agents and neither can keep it in his trousers; Holgado even makes a pass at his own daughter - he hasn't seen her since she was twelve when his wife kicked him out - and Chabat is even banging the baby sitter. Despite everything - including the one affair to which he confessed, after being found out - his wife, Victoria Abril, still loves him passionately but he is always too bushed to respond to her amorous advances. Enter writer-director Balasko as a cigar-smoking lesbian; she calls at the house in Chabat's absence to ask for water for her car's radiator, stays to fix a blocked sink - oh, you HAVE got dirty minds - and seduce Abril. Subsequently she moves in, The Dyke Who Came To Dinner if you will and this, naturally, arouses Chabat's jealousy; NOW he wants his wife. For a while they co-exist with Abril sharing her favours with both of them. Chabat is still not a happy bunny and finally Balasko tells him her price for walking away from Abril: He, Chabat, will impregnate Balasko, who, at forty, has taken to biological clock-watching. Ultimately, when she almost gives birth in the street, it is Chabat holding her hand and comforting her and turning into the doting father. If a friend saw this movie by chance and told me the outline, omitting to mention the underlying warmth of Balasko, who's about as convincing as a butch lesbian as Arnie would be as a ballerina, and the sympathetic way it deals with alternative lifestyles I'd probably have avoided it like anything by Godard but knowing Balasko's fine track record as well as that of fellow director-actor Chabat to say nothing of Ticky Holgado I snapped up the DVD and I'm glad I did.
Review of French Twist
