Customer Reviews

Ma femme est une actrice (Original French Version)

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My Wife Is an Actress ("Ma Femme Est une Actrice") stars Charlotte Gainsbourg--ex-child star, daughter of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, beautiful and accomplished actress--alongside her real-life husband Yvan Attal, who also directs. Attal is a humble sports journalist married to a famous international star (played by Gainsbourg) and uncomfortable with her celebrity. His first film as a director plays knowingly with off-screen reality: the two leads even use their own names, Charlotte and Yvan, for the characters they play.
In the film, Charlotte goes to London to appear in a romantic drama opposite British movie icon John (Terence Stamp, sending himself up with some luvvie-ish posturing). Left at home, Yvan torments himself with thoughts of his wife playing sex scenes with John and his jealousy puts their marriage at risk. His visits to her on the set in London only make things worse.

There's scope here for some good comedy, as well as an interesting exploration of how, in an actor's life, reality and artifice can snarl each other up. But Attal, who also scripted, makes his characters so shallow and two-dimensional that it's hard to believe in them, let alone care about them. A sub-plot about the squabbling between Yvan's sister and her husband over whether their unborn son should be circumcised (she's Jewish, he's not) feels tacked-on and tiresome. In aspiring to script and star in his directorial debut, Attal may have overstretched himself. Given a stronger script, this could have been a funnier or more searching film, or both.

The movie could have been great, if it weren't for an unavoidable ever-present sub-plot promoting the crime against humanity of ritual Male Genital Mutilation (circumcision). Most about this comedy seems rather light, fresh, and funny, a kind of comedy for a large audience. One would expect such a movie to deliver a happy ending for the little baby boy. The film maker choose to not save the baby from the criminal insanity of adults; he also insisted on showing a supposedly humorous nude group scene with a majority of obviously emasculated adult males (fortunately not representative of the French society!), as if such was the 'normal' way males look. A sure way to take the fun out of a fun scene. Actress Charlotte Gainsbourg and actor/film maker Yvan Attal play the role of Charlotte and Yvan in the movie, in a somewhat autobiographic style, to apparently explore the main theme of the movie: the temptation of matrimonial infidelity for stars, and the inherent difficulty for star spouses to handle the pressure. In real life, they are a married couple with a baby boy at the time of the movie, which made me feel like the audience is deliberately forced into approving a hideous crime potentially committed by this tandem against their very own kid. The sub-plot about the baby which his sister is expecting throughout the movie is very insistent, and keeps us hoping until the very end that this baby boy will be spared the knife of the ritual criminal butcher. Yvan Attal could not have destroyed his movie any better way than by ending the movie the way he did. In a good happy ending in a comedy for a large audience, the baby is traditionally saved. Everything else seems to end well (happy ending the relationship of the couple), but the emasculation of the baby destroyed this work, which becomes a propaganda gimmick to justify a cowardly crime against humanity. Ritual Male Genital Mutilation cannot make a happy ending, just like ritual cannibalism could not. This movie is unredeemable, morally on the wrong side of Human Rights. The state of the art has been corrupted by its clear intended use: the enrollment of mankind into a conspiracy against defenseless children, a massive systematic criminal violation of Human Rights.