Look at Me (Comme un image)

This evening I finally went to see the movie, directed by Agnes Jaoui, whose title is for some reason translated in English as 'Look At Me'. The French title is 'Comme un Image' -- and a better translation in so many ways would have been 'Like a Picture' or if they wanted to be catchy -- 'Picture Perfect'. The film is a family drama in the broadest sense...the characters are all paired off in overlapping ways, with intersecting lives. As they criss-cross, the characters find themselves at every moment making choices about how to live, and at every moment, almost every moment, they choose badly. The characters whose lives are 'comme un image' are in fact the least virtuous and the least likeable of the lot. The characters whose lives are, for lack of a better word, authentic, end up being the most likeable, even if they might not be virtuous. Individuals fill certain roles, roles which in many instances have a degree of celebrity, and at a certain point they cease to be individuals in their own right, but merely inhabit the roles they have slipped into. This existential theme is intertwined with meditations on the difference between men's and women's roles and the different pressures men and women face. The central character -- Lolita - is an overweight but nonetheless striking woman who does not see her own beauty. She is driven only to get her father's attention, and men's attention in general, and this is in part due to the fact that her father seems to go out of his way to be extraordinarily unsupportive and inattentive. The dynamic between the two of them ripples through the other characters...Sylvia, the singing teacher, Sebastian (whose real name is Rashid, but who goes by Sebastian to make his life easier), Pierre, Sylvia's husband, a newly successful writer, his friend Felix, his soon to be former editor, Edith, the father's young wife, Karine, their young daughter, and his sidekick Edward. Given it is a film about authenticity, the film runs a great risk...it is itself a series of images, after all. Nonetheless it wears its humanity on its sleeve. It has a gentle beauty, and is well worth seeing.