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A man wearing a neck brace and inflicted with amnesia groggily wanders the streets of Paris in search of some clue, some random sighting, that might jog a recollection or two and tell him who he is and how he got there. That's the terrific opening scene of Daniele Dubroux's
Diary of a Seducer, and from there the film is one big, wacky flashback zigzagging its way to the present-day wanderings of our unfortunate amnesiac. The solution involves a half-hearted student, Claire (Chiara Mastroianni), who finds and returns a copy of Kierkegaard's book
Diary of a Seducer--the story of a boy's methodical plan to sleep with an innocent young woman--to its creepy owner, Gregory (Melvil Poupaud). Gregory insists that Claire read the tome, which she does and magically falls for him, becoming immersed in his reclusive world of paranoid grandmothers, corpses kept in freezers, and a friend (the iconic Jean-Pierre Leaud) who holds a gun to his head at dinner. Written and directed by Dubroux, who plays Claire's mother, the film's weird phenomena are more dreamy than literal, part of a cracked logic that grows into a narrative maze. Dubroux can make things unnecessarily muddy at times, but she does have an entertaining way of deepening the mystery moment-to- moment and making the inexplicable seem funny.
--Tom Keogh
