My Man (1996)
In Lyon, where many are unemployed, Marie is a prostitute who loves her work: she's thoughtful and exuberant toward clients old and young, slim or flabby. One night, a homeless man sleeps in the foyer of her apartment house; she gives him a hot meal, then a place on the floor to sleep by her radiator, then she offers herself. She falls in love, giving him new life, clothes, a place to live. When he grouses that he must bar hop while she uses the flat for her work, she finds them a larger flat. He grows restless, seducing a manicurist and pressing her to prostitution. He's arrested for procuring, so Marie must decide what to do; he, too, must face the consequences of his choices.
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It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.
Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.
By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.
The cinema of Blier will never age, like the smile of Mona Lisa. Vinci put on the canvas the secrecy of the heart of this woman, and, in "Mon Homme", there is the same shamelessness, Bertrand Blier expose his characters and strips until their hearts... There is tenderness, all the tenderness of the world, as in the "Voyage to the end of the night" of Louis Ferdinand Céline. It is a black film, a pink film... The setting in scene is splendid and the images are extremely neat, splendid. This film is an explosive mixture of beauty, tenderness, shamelessness and emotions :So only a few people can love this movie and can appreciate Blier (not the Blier of "the balls" or "tenue of soirée", of course...)
As usual with a Blier film, the narrative is elliptical and challenging. In this study of the relationships between the sexes, Blier employs his considerable directorial skills in a bleakly funny "story" that follows the happy prostitute Marie, who befriends a tramp who later becomes her pimp. The film constantly challenges the male and female stereotypes, though some of the depictions of women in the film do raise the suspicion of misogyny on the director's part. However, a male character's apology to "all women" - made straight to camera at the very last moment of the film - seems to suggest that he is being deliberately provocative. I will need to see the film again to make up my mind.I will say, though, that this movie is well worth watching. It's inventive, clever, funny, and just great cinema.
A strange mixture of a film which involves pimps,prostitution and whoring as a profession and way of life. Basically a comedy it does put some serious questions about unemployment and job searching in a world that doesn't seem to care anymore. Beautiful Marie, a hooker, invites a scruffy homeless starving beggar into her luxurious apartment and gives him a meal of lamb stew and red wine and a liberal helping of sex for dessert (Can you believe it?) When Marie grows weary of her life of sex. she approaches Jean-Francois a total stranger and begs him to give her two children ( I ask you!) Individual acting is good but so wasted on a silly script. Handsome Olivier Martinez as Jean-Francois gives the film a nice lift in his too few scenes. I especially liked the "Begging" scene in which he pushes forward against a surging stream of pedestrians. (Some real cinema at last) I must also mention the cuckoo clock scene. When the beggar (who is trained as a pimp) is released from jail he is approached by a sex-hungry woman who takes him to her home for coffee. In her kitchen he is startled by her cuckoo clock which he promptly smashes to pieces. Now...is this supposed to be exciting cinema? The French can do better than this!!!
A strangely structured film which ultimately makes for a quite moving meditation on the loneliness of sexual predetermination. The characters reach out in random lurching stabs at love - she impulsively invites the homeless man to be her pimp and later picks out someone in a bar to be the father of her child; when the pimp leaves jail he's instantly met by a woman who's been waiting for a convict to befriend, and so on. The closing note of male contrition could be taken as a pallid attempt to redress the balance of a film that often seems to enjoy the advantages for the male ego of freely offered female desire, and yet the remorse is real and touching. The movie expands the theme to encompass economic and social impotence - particularly in the wrenching scene where the husband can't get work and loses it. The note of proud possession in the title of a film that ultimately finds only loss and compromise is ultimately ironic I think, as much as the overblown Barry White score, grabbing boldly at sweeping gestures and passions which we all know to be generally unattainable. The gleaming visuals, often shot from a composed distance, give it the slightly metallic sheen of science fiction: in some scenes the crowd moves like a mechanical construction, powered by a single desultory consciousness.