Looking For Hortense

Don't spend too much time looking for Kristin Scott Thomas in writer-director Pascal Bonitzer's Looking For Hortense (aka Cherchez Hortense). In keeping with the fleeting presence afforded the Hortense of the title, the divine Scott Thomas gets her customary star billing only to pretty much vanish from a largely somnolent Gallic exercise that sorely needs this actress's effortless command and wit.

Cast as a theatre director called Iva who strays into the arms of her leading man - quelle surprise! - Scott Thomas is pretty much jettisoned from a plot that could use more of her and less of the dourness that soon prevails.

The film's rather baleful protagonist turns out to be Iva's partner, Damien (Jean-Pierre Bacri), a put-upon sort who seems to take a grim-faced attitude to life even before its various demands come to call. For starters, there's his concern for the couple's bespectacled, hyper-conscientious son, Noé, which swiftly gives way to a series of reluctant encounters with Damien's imperious if unexpectedly camp father (Claude Rich, pictured with Bacri), who may have it within his officialdom to stop the deportation of a friend of Iva's sister-in-law - a Serbian woman whom Damien, as it happens, has never met. 

What ensues is a portrait of contemporary France as a far-from-melting pot populated by sexually saturnine Oriental waiters, closeted Gallic figures of authority (the father's remark about sleeping with men without being gay could have come right out of Tony Kushner's Angels in America), and women adrift in a culture that they can't necessarily call home. That Damien himself is an academic prompts the gathering sense that Bonitzer's narrative exists to fulfill a thesis about human behaviour. These characters feel as if they are being observed from the outside looking in, which thereby keeps us at a remove from empathy or even engagement for much of the time.

The women are more arresting, starting with Scott Thomas as a créatrice who is doing as best she can to maintain both her spousal integrity - and her perm. And the near-ubiquitous (in her native cinema, anyway) Isabelle Carré brings a lovely naturalness to the part of Aurore, a local restaurant employee who becomes an equivalent Scarlett Johansson to the indrawn Bill Murray, Gallic-style, that Damien can be said to be. As for the eponymous Hortense, blink and you'll miss the relevance of the title. Or maybe Scott Thomas, in absentia for so much of the movie, is on the prowl still. 

Watch the trailer for Looking for Hortense over the page