Starring Nathalie Baye, Bulle Ogier, Samuel Le Bihan, Audrey Tautou, Jacques Bonnaffe, Mathilde Seigner, Claire Nebout, Robert Hossein,
Directed by Tonie Marshall.
For almost 30 years, Nathalie Baye has been a vision of loveliness in the French cinema. It's a loveliness of a particular kind -- not exotic, haughty or mysterious, but matter-of-fact and rather delicate.
Though Baye is best known in the United States for her roles in Truffaut's "Day for Night" (1973) and the award-winning "La Balance" (1982), most of her films have not been released here. So 2000 has been a kind of Baye bonanza: "An Affair of Love" opened a couple of months ago, and now we get "Venus Beauty Institute" -- an uneven film but one of considerable charm.
The charm comes, in large part, from the actress herself, who plays Angele, a beautician whose love life is an endless string of one-night stands and sorry dead ends. We first meet her in a scene at a train station, talking a mile a minute to her sullen lover about all the plans she has for their future.
When he dumps her minutes later, she makes a public spectacle of herself, yelling and threatening to stalk him.
Angele is an aging woman. She claims to be 40 but looks about 45, and her life is pretty much what it was 20 years before -- revolving around nothing but romance and sex. But now the lack of any deeper attachment or ambition is beginning to become unseemly.
The film takes its name from its principal location, the Venus Beauty Institute, a beauty parlor where Angele gives massages and does facials. Tonie Marshall, who wrote and directed, presents the beauty parlor as ground zero in a female world enslaved to surfaces. The walls are pink, and each time someone opens the door, a sound is heard that's something like a harp. It's a place where reality is kept at bay, or at least an attempt is made. Twice in the film, a middle-aged woman claims to look much younger than her age, and in each case she doesn't.
Marshall suggests that Angele, like the other women in the film, has been sold a bill of goods. But the movie is less interested in exploring the questions of who sold it and why women buy it than in telling the story of Angele and her romance with Antoine (Samuel Le Bihan), a man who sees Angele on the street and decides that he's in love with her.
The romance is not as fascinating as the filmmaker would like it to be, but the movie needs a love story, and this one is good enough. At first -- because Antoine is one of those guys who either doesn't wash his hair or puts stuff in it to make it look that way -- he appears to be a bum who won't stop bothering her. But eventually he emerges as a sensitive, impetuous guy who is willing to disengage from his fiancee and screw up his whole life just to be with Angele.
More interesting are Baye's scenes of Angele going about her daily life, going to work, dealing with customers, talking with her girlfriends. Baye wisely plays her not as a sullen type but as a vivacious woman going through a beaten-down period. Every so often she roars back to life, though the energy is often reckless and self-destructive. There's a particularly strong scene in which she walks into a restaurant and picks up a man in less than a minute.
If "Venus Beauty Institute" has a message, it eluded me. But the film raises questions, and it has atmosphere. Most importantly it has Baye in an ideal role. -- Advisory: This film contains strong language.
The reason women's pictures continue to be so entertaining (and by "women's pictures," I don't mean feminist movies or movies directed by women but the sort of picture that's targeted toward female audiences, the movie equivalent of soaps) is that they're usually full of two things that movies thrive on: gossip and melodrama.
But the explicit infusion of feminism hasn't done the genre any favors. All the "women's issues" that were implicitly addressed in the old soapy pictures (motherhood, career vs. love, succeeding in a man's world, competing against other women) are now shoved to the forefront like position papers. There are still entertaining women's melodramas, like "Dolores Clairborne," and comedies, like "How Stella Got Her Groove Back." But with the addition of an ax to grind, we've seen potentially fun hen-fests like "The First Wives Club" instead become screechy and broad, and shameless melodrama like "Fried Green Tomatoes" turn crassly manipulative and self-righteous.
Which is why the new French film "Venus Beauty Institute" comes as something of a relief. It doesn't have the sudsy energy of the old women's melodramas; it's a quieter type of movie, but it has the old women's-picture spirit. The characters suffer for love and soldier on with only their wisecracking wit to soften the heartache. "Venus Beauty Institute" translates the old Hollywood formulas into a French mode (i.e., the characters talk out their dilemmas as much as they act on them) and the familiarity is relaxing. Writer-director Tonie Marshall and her actors provide the confidence of professionalism. The goods here may be more muted than you'd get in a traditional Hollywood soaper, but you know that they're going to be delivered.
"Venus Beauty Institute" is set in and around a Paris beauty salon. The characters exist along a sliding scale of age and experience. The fastidious and brilliant Bulle Ogier plays Madame Nadine, the salon owner. A well-kept, well-preserved partridge in Chanel suits, Nadine is like a pinball given the gift of self-discipline. She careens from keeping her girls sharply in line to fawning over her customers without missing a beat or going astray.
In the almost 40 years she's been making movies, Ogier has been different from role to role, from the neurasthenic Victorian murderess of "Celine and Julie Go Boating" to the druggy society girl of "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" to the most indiscreet aging bohemian in "Irma Vep." As Nadine, she seems to carry the history of those performances with her. They might be the various roles Nadine has tried on before settling on that of shrewd, no-nonsense businesswoman. Ogier gives an old pro's performance. Nadine has become the successful "Madame Nadine" because she's never lost touch with her cunning inner broad.
Nathalie Baye's Ang�le, the movie's central character, is Nadine without the self-knowledge or grounding. She's smart enough to have her own salon, but she hasn't shed the traces of youthful self-destructiveness to be able to focus on what she wants. Ang�le is a whiz with the customers, dispensing the pampering and reassurance they're looking for, but her own life is a mess. Riven with guilt over the accident that left an old beau (Jacques Bonnaff�) permanently scarred, Ang�le is the classic romantic posing as a cynic, seeking one-night stands instead of love. And she can't trust herself to respond to the overtures of Antoine (Samuelle Bihan), a young man who spots her on the street and is ready to throw over his fianc�e and declare everlasting love to her.
That situation is presented as proof of Ang�le's inability to take a chance on love, though it doesn't quite work that way. Marshall doesn't establish the love-drunk atmosphere of romantic fantasy where people fall in mad love at first sight. Would you trust a guy who tells you he loves you the first time he talks to you and that he's ready to dump his fianc�e for you? Luckily, Marshall keeps focused on Ang�le's wounded cynicism rather than Antoine's improbable ardor.
As a younger actress Nathalie Baye always seemed a little too bland, a little too nice. She has always carried a resemblance to Kathy Baker, but she lacked Baker's warmth and recognizably human imperfections. It turns out that she's one of those performers who's blossomed in her 40s, who has acquired some sharp edges and command with age. She gave a tender, slightly sad performance earlier this year in "An Affair of Love." Playing a character enjoying a clandestine relationship with a younger man, she was a woman who has traded self-knowledge for a shot of happiness and was trying to face the consequences without regret.
Angele (Nathalie Baye) is a woman of around 40 -- maybe a little older, but younger looking, as she coyly tells a date -- who works at the Paris skin-care and manicure salon for which ''Venus Beauty Institute'' is named. Because of a bad experience, which resulted in the scarring of a former boyfriend's face, Angele has sworn off love, instead pursuing a series of one-night stands with an unsettling mixture of callousness and neediness.
One fine day, as they say in French, a scruffy sculptor named Antoine (Samuel Le Bihan) falls madly in love with Angele and starts stalking her, lurking outside the salon and observing her every move from afar.
If nothing else ''Venus Beauty Institute,'' a huge hit in France and the winner of a handful of Cesars (including awards for best picture, best director and best screenplay), is a lesson in cultural differences. In the United States, Angele would probably file for a restraining order against Antoine. In France -- or in a French movie at any rate -- she starts dating him and slowly comes to realize that his wild devotion represents her last shot at true love.
In form, then, this movie, written and directed by Tonie Marshall, is a romantic comedy in which the central couple must navigate the logistical and emotional obstacles that stand between them and ultimate happiness. But the mood is curiously somber, at times almost harsh, and an aftertaste of bleak resignation lingers after the sweet perfume of romanticism has evaporated.
At the heart of this paradox is the institute itself, a place done up in soft pink where customers are greeted with a tinkling chime. The proprietor is Nadine, an incarnation of middle-aged French feminine elegance, played -- it's not much of a stretch -- by the divine Bulle Ogier. In addition to Angele, the staff includes two younger women, the moody Samantha (Mathilde Seigner) and the dark-eyed, faux-naive Marie (Audrey Tautou); their romantic doings, in particular Marie's courting by a suave, older gentleman client (Robert Hossein), provide some humorous relief.
The film's main source of comedy comes from the women who parade through the salon in quest of the secrets of youth and beauty. A certain Madame Buisse (Claire Nebout) blows in without an appointment -- or anything on under her trench coat -- and monopolizes the tanning booth. Mostly, though, Ms. Marshall observes the institute's customers -- who are anxious about wrinkles and liver spots, desperate to hold on to the attention of the men in their lives -- with a satirical detachment that is almost cruel.
She clearly has a point to make about the tyranny of good looks and the lengths and expense to which women will go to hold on to them, but it often seems as though she's making fun of the women -- and men -- who fall short of the ideal. Angele's former boyfriend, Jacques (Jacques Bonnaffe), has a few small scars on one side of his face, yet other characters treat him as if he were the Elephant Man, and it is assumed that his mild disfigurement has damned him to a life of sorrow and solitude. Late in the movie, Angele goes to visit her spinster aunts in Poitiers, and the fussiness and vanity with which they cover up their essential loneliness is meant as a pointed lesson to their niece.
Ms. Baye is a sensitive actress, and it is impossible not to be drawn to any character she plays. But like the arch, trivial ''Affair of Love,'' ''Venus Beauty Institute'' takes unfair advantage of her gift for generating sympathy. Angele's relationship with Antoine never seems especially believable; it's stipulated by the script, rather than embodied by the actors. And her psychological anguish seems inexplicable. When matters are finally resolved between them, there is a curious and, for a romantic comedy, fatal absence of tenderness.
The film has occasional moments of heat, but not much warmth. And while it is pretty enough to look at, real beauty eludes it.
Venus Beauty Institute has Douglas Sirk's soapy prints all over it. The C�sar Award-winning French film follows in the footsteps of Sirk's sudsy �women's pictures� of the Fifties, renowned (or reviled, depending on who you talk to) for their unabashedly melodramatic sentiments. Here, the melodrama revolves around Ang�le (Baye), a beautician and aging beauty employed at the Venus Beauty Institute salon. One day, Ang�le's monotonous, uninspiring existence is rocked when she meets Antoine (Bihan), a hulking sculptor who spies Ang�le at a train station and follows her home. Ang�le attempts to resist Antoine's persistent wooing (some might say stalking). See, Ang�le's been burned by love: A previous, volatile affair ended in a disfiguring accident, and Ang�le's own parents' marriage concluded in a murder/suicide.
Venus Beauty Institute is a soap-operatic catalog of obsessive, inexplicable loves. In addition to Ang�le and Antoine's romantic traumas, Antoine's fianc�e is slowly going mad from her betrothed's infidelity. Then there's the older client who receives weekly facials to keep fresh the face his late wife gave to him. (After a fire badly burned him, his wife had skin from her derri�re grafted onto his deformed face.) Later, he becomes obsessed with Marie, Ang�le's captivating and barely legal co-worker/friend. Marie, in turn, is won over by the sad-faced man easily 40 years her senior, aided not a little by that neat mink stole and string of pearls he has lavished on her.
If I sound doubtful of the realness of any of these loves, it's because I am. This isn't a disbelief in love that resides outside the box of what is standard, what is acceptable. Uncommon love can and has been ably, achingly rendered onscreen. Harold and Maude produced just about the most preposterous pairing cinema's offered up, but it worked, in a giddy, bizarre, beautiful way. And in the hands of a better script and direction (both by Marshall), the logic-defying couplings in Venus Beauty Institute might have similarly succeeded.
To Marshall's credit, Venus Beauty Institute looks stunning, saturated with confectionary pinks and blues, and the actors do a fine job with the script, which is, for all its sensationalism, oddly underwritten. But while Sirk's melodramas were steeped in overt histrionics, Marshall's piece plays everything cool, all French and moodylike. As Sirk understood, good melodrama elicits the most guttural of reactions, demands a sob that catches in the throat and settles in the belly. Disappointingly, Venus Beauty Institute is not good melodrama. No despairing sobs here, only world-weary, so-very-French sighs, and a picture that warmed my heart about as much as the cold cream Ang�le slathers all over her wrinkling clients.
On a busy street corner in Paris, Angele (Nathalie Baye) closes up shop at the elegant beauty spa known as the Venus Beauty Institute. The camera remains outside its glass door, giving the scene a loneliness and alienation that will, as it turns out, be examined with wit and depth in the film that follows. Angele, a woman in her early 40s, is one of four women whose lives Venus Beauty Institute examines with Gallic irony. The others are Madame Nadine (Bulle Ogier), the chic blonde businesswoman who owns the salon; Marie (Audrey TauTou), the gorgeous young brunette whose na�vete turns out to be profitable if not deceptive; and Samantha (Mathilde Seigner), who flirts with a variety of men but takes none of them seriously.
It is Angele who suffers for love, and there is a splendid scene early in the film during which she chases her latest lover through a train station, begging him to love her and then castigating him at the top of her lungs once the cause is lost. This emotional tirade is ignored by crowds swirling around the parting lovers, but not by a handsome young law student, Antoine (Samuel Le Bihan). He follows Angele to the Venus Beauty Institute and declares eternal love for her. She finds his passion preposterous. Half her age, Antoine admits that he is engaged to another, but suddenly finds himself unable to care for anyone but Angele.
Yet when Angele, exhausted by his pursuit, seems willing to respond sexually, he rejects her and flees-too sensitive, it seems, to overcome his overwhelming feeling of reverence for her. In the meantime, the women at work handle a wide range of clientele, including a prosperous widower with obvious designs on the vulnerable Marie, as well as a sexy housewife who enjoys displaying her body, flitting about Paris naked under her autumn coat. Nadine is planning to open a second beauty spa, but she and Samantha are getting on each other's nerves, snapping at each other like turtles.
Angele's melodramatic romance with Antoine threatens to reach a violent conclusion when Antoine's ex-fiance (Helene Filliere) undergoes spasms of jealousy and approaches them with pistol in hand. Things look grim, but there is nothing to fear. The resolution is more photogenic than violent, an appropriate conclusion for a film that has dealt with our obstinate desire for the triumph of appearance over reality.
Director Tonie Marshall's script is consistently absorbing, with a remarkable way of balancing wry and perceptive observations with the mundane. Her characters all seem to suffer from the loneliness of life in the big city, but at the same time remain charmingly sympathetic. Nathalie Baye's performance is, as usual, absorbing. She is one of those actresses who says volumes with a look or a gesture, but when she speaks, her words are sledgehammer-blunt and often devastating.
One of the things I love about French movies is the way the camera gazes at beautiful French women both old and young. Venus Beauty Institute has a pair of stunners, one in her 40's (Nathalie Baye, from Francois Truffaut's Day for Night) and one in her 20's (Audrey Tautou), and the camera loves them both. We thoroughly get to know their faces by the end of the movie.
The movie focuses more attention on Baye, the older of the two, which is exactly the opposite of what would happen if this movie were made by Americans. Baye plays Angele, a beautician whose attitude on love and romance is jaded and burnt out. We first see her happily chattering away with a new love interest. She chatters perhaps too much, though, and the beau leaves her forever. However, another shaggy fellow has witnessed the scene and has fallen madly in love with Angele. He spies on her and eventually speaks to her in a cafe. It turns out he's a sculptor (only in France can a sculptor make a living) with a fiancee, but he's unable to stop thinking about our Angele.
Tautou, who won a special Cesar award for Best Young Actress, plays Marie, a young goddess who treats an older man at the beauty institute. The man's face scars were covered with flesh from his late wife's body, and he wants to take care of it. Marie is drawn to the tender older man, much to the horror of her co-workers.
Interestingly, none of the men in Venus Beauty Institute are very attractive. Besides the shaggy, homeless-looking sculptor and the wounded man, there is also Angele's friend with scars on one side of his face. Every time he comes in the shop, another of the workers asks him, "facial?" In another scene, a sleazy guy comes in wondering if he can get an erotic massage.
With Venus Beauty Institute, director Tonie Marshall turns in a lightweight, enjoyable film where love wins out over all. It even takes place during Christmas and New Year's Eve, lending a magical feel to the proceedings. This is helped by the harp-strum noise that accompanies every opening of the beauty institute's door. (Though if I heard it one more time I was going to rip my hair out.)
Overall, Venus Beauty Institute is merely an excuse to gaze at beautiful women and for audiences to nurse their romantic longings. It's a great date movie, provided your date doesn't mind reading subtitles.
"Love," says Angele, a middle-aged beautician who works at a chic Parisian salon, "is just another form of slavery. It makes me sick and mean." As played by Nathalie Baye in Tonie Marshall's Venus Beauty Institute, Angele is a character rarely seen in films: an aging woman who refuses the easy comforts of a relationship, preferring undemanding, transitory flings with men who have no expectations at all.
Angele comes by her distrust of love honestly. Her father killed her mother, suspecting infidelity, then killed himself when he realized that she'd actually been faithful. Angele herself then went on to disfigure her lover Jacques (Jacques Bonaffe) in a quarrel. Now that she's "forty...no, older, but I look younger," she's convinced herself that she wants nothing to do with commitment.
She's fooling no one but herself. As the film opens, she flirts with a young lover in a cafe. She's charming but edgy, dripping vulnerability as she tells him stories about her first boyfriend. He cuts her off to explain that he'll be leaving her for good, and her coy front dissolves into rage. She chases him down the street as he skulks to his train, yelling insults and challenges at his back, furious at herself for falling for him. She's followed out by an amiable bear of a man (Samuelle Bihan) who watches her scream, delighted by the spectacle. The film follows the course of their relationship as he moves from stalking her to introducing himself.
Most of Venus Beauty Institute takes place in the salon, where Angele spends her days making women feel better about themselves, listening patiently as they agonize over bad affairs and sagging bodies. These scenes are shot in the icy blues and pinks of the store's neon sign, and Marshall allows them to drag on well after their narrative points are made. Their very length adds up; we begin to feel the extent to which these women have made a career of keeping up their looks.
Angele is surrounded by women whose own lives (a little too pointedly) reflect her own. The salon's proprietor, Nadine (Bulle Ogier), is older than Angele and strictly independent. She believes that Angele is wasting herself as a minimum wage beautician and should be running a shop of her own. Two younger employees, Marie (Audrey Tatou) and Samantha (Mathilde Seigner), are beginning lives that echo the possibilities of Angele's own situation. Marie, both beautiful and ingenuous, is becoming involved with a much older widower who's been treated for severe facial burns. Samantha is already embittered, a failed nurse who recognizes at twenty that she's blown her best opportunities.
The material in the salon is unusual - films rarely linger on the lives of aging working class women - but pat, with each life reflecting the other too easily. The film soars when it leaves the shop for Angele's life outside. In several scenes, she tries to pick up strangers in restaurants. Her mix of bravado and desperation, candor and gamesmanship is dazzling: the men are left startled and a little scared by her intensity. Baye performs these scenes fearlessly, reveling in a character who's unafraid to look both sordid and needy.
This is Baye's second film this year that explores the sexual complications of an older woman's life. Both this and An Affair of Love are interesting less for their accomplishments (they're extremely thin movies, overwritten and underdramatized) than for what they attempt. And Baye is spectacular in each film. If she can ever manage to find a script that tackles this subject at the level she routinely reaches here, it will be an astonishing film.
A bittersweet romantic comedy, French style. The one thing this film has going for it, is Nathalie Baye in the starring role. She's been around as a star ever since her 1973 role in Truffaut's "Day for Night" and Bob Swaim's well-received "La Balance" (1982). But it took Godard's 1979 "Every Man for Himself " to make her an international star. She has hardly had American recognition because most of her over 50-films were not released in the States. Here she stars as Ang�le, an attractive forty-year-old beautician working in the titled Parisian salon. She has a life history of one-night stands because she's afraid of looking for love and getting dumped on, as she once was when she was more trustful of men. This became a very popular French film winning France's C�sar awards for best picture, best director, best young actress and best screenplay.
The film opens with Ang�le, at a train station caf�, talking about future plans with her much younger lover, who seems disinterested. When she finishes, he insultingly tells her their affair is over because she has a skinny ass. She's so hurt by this that she makes a public scene, shouting curses at him and threatening to stalk him. Watching this take place is a young bearded sculptor, Antoine (Le Bihan), who becomes fascinated and stalks her.
In this romantic comedy, the two destined lovers must overcome all the emotional barriers that separate them before their romance could be fully tested. As is the custom in a French film of this kind, love is the most important thing in the world. The film keys in on the working-class girl, who is concerned about aging and being alone. She has to put aside her personal troubles and sell beauty to the varied women and few men clients. Her salon is equipped with the harp sounding chimes as the door is opened and is inundated by blue and pink interior surroundings, and all sorts of beauty products and services for facials, massages, and tanning. There are various other cosmetic services offered as 'feel good' treatments. The salon to be used as a metaphor for how women are deceived into thinking they can change their surface appearances and find happiness through something as superficial as cosmetics. It's also the one place they have for relaxing and living with the lies they tell themselves, as they use this place as a retreat from their real life problems. A Madame Buisse (Claire Nebout) comes in without anything on under her trench coat � and walks around nude before entering the tanning booth.
Ang�le is a good listener and offers friendly advice to her pampered clients. She is trusted by the elegant business-oriented salon owner, Nadine (Ogier), and is even encouraged by her to open up her own salon. She forms a workplace friendship with her two other much younger workers. The sexually active Samantha (Seigner) is ready to pack it in and become a nurse, as she keeps falling in and out of love and is not happy where she's at. While the very young and naive Marie (Tautou-Cesar winner), is content in her job. She is gently wooed by a lonely, rich widowed pilot (Hossein). He had a crippling accident which caused him to have his wife's thigh skin grafted onto him and that is the reason he comes into the salon daily for treatments to preserve the skin. He gives her jewelry gifts and demands nothing in return, but Marie doesn't mind pleasing him. Ang�le is just a little puzzled why he didn't choose her.
At first, we don't know what to make of Antoine, whether he's a psycho or just a drifter, as his straggly appearance is not appealing to Ang�le. When Antoine catches up with her in a coffee shop after stalking her at her salon, he comes on so strong that it's either a bit frightening or weirdly comical. He tells her: "I can't stop thinking of you -- I love you so much."
Antoine's plea for affection is so strong: that he shaves off his beard to look more presentable, treats her to a delicious restaurant meal and refuses a blow job because she's drunk. Antoine tells her the truth about breaking up with his beautiful young fianc�e, and turns out to be an intelligent and sensitive person; this makes Ang�le rethink her attitude about avoiding a true love affair.
In Ang�le's confused state she still clings to her former boyfriend, the facially scarred, so-called loser, Jacques (Bonnaff�), whom she doesn't love but still needs around to console her. Ang�le also shows how she can waltz into a restaurant alone and pick out the most attractive man, albeit a married one, sit down with him, talk nonsense and go for a quick bang shortly afterwards.
The beauty is in the way Baye interprets her character's many moods and of how she lives with her mental pain, but still is a lively person who is capable of finding what joy there is in her life while also maintaining a friendly, non-competitive relationship with her clients and fellow workers.
It's a sexy French romp into familiar territory, with characters who don't tell us much about what's inside them. But, "Venus..." is able to remain pleasantly atmospheric until the nonsensical melodramatic climax.
There's nothing new uncovered about relationships here, in fact the main relationship is more absurd than real. But Nathalie Baye is able to carry off this fantasy romance further than it deserved to go, and for that alone it's worth a look.
"Salon" would certainly be a more attractive English rendering of the last word in the title than the one which Lot 47 has decided to employ in their stateside release of Tonie Marshall's comedy-drama "Venus Beaute Institut," but that's a minor blemish on a picture which, while almost aggressively French in tone and style, is nonetheless an affecting, if fragile and flawed, meditation on the realities of romance and aging.
The picture centers on the staff and customers at a neighborhood beauty parlor, and in particular Angele (Nathalie Baye, remembered as the deserted wife in "The Return of Martin Guerre"), at forty the oldest of the three girls working in the establishment. The script opens with a sequence showing Angele being rather unceremoniously dumped by an arrogant fellow with whom she's had a few days' pleasure (and has obviously expected a long-term relationship); that sequence, and some later conversations between the woman and a scarred friend (Jacques Bonnaffe) for whose injuries she apparently feels responsible (and for whom she has some unreciprocated desire), show us a person in need of human contact but at the same time fearful of it. Fortunately- -or not--the unpleasant break-up has been witnessed by a younger man, Antoine (Samuel Le Bihan), who falls madly in love with Angele despite the fact that he's engaged to a much younger woman. The narrative thread running through "Venus Beauty Institute" is whether Angele can overcome her reservations and accept Antoine's advances.
Swirling around this central romantic possibility are others involving her co-workers, the 20-year old Marie (Audrey Tautou) who's gently seduced by a much older widower (Robert Hossein) and the flighty (and as it turns out suicidal) Samantha (Mathilde Seigner), as well as the shop's owner Nadine (Bulle Ogier). None of the relationships are portrayed in obvious or overly explicit fashion; as is characteristic of this sort of arty French fare, everything is expressed elliptically and obliquely, so that the emotions are always somewhat clouded and uncertain (as, to tell the truth, are some of the motivations).
Whether you enjoy the picture, therefore, will depend a great deal on whether you're inclined to savor this sort of mood piece, which relishes suggestion rather than declamation and is happy to leave loose ends unresolved and use supporting characters simply for the picturesque relish they add to the mix. For this viewer, it goes seriously awry only at the very end, when a melodramatic climax tries to generate some false suspense and a tacked-on "magical" final shot fails to have the intended uplifting effect. Before then, however, Marshall is generally successful in maintaining interest and keeping a slyly insinuating atmosphere, helped greatly by the lovely setting of the shop itself (the wisp of harp music that's set off every time its door opens is a motif that becomes almost hypnotic) and even more by the knowing, ultimately touching performance of Baye. Less controlled and impassive than in "Martin Guerre," she remains a radiant presence even when she's supposed to seem plain and ordinary. Baye is ably seconded by Le Bihan, who manages to keep us as uncertain of his ultimate intentions as Angele is.
"Venus Beauty Institute" doesn't reach the heights of the best French fare dealing with the vagaries of l'amour, but in its gentle, wispy way it succeeds in evoking the mysterious nature of romance better than most Hollywood entries on the subject.
Tonie Marshall's Venus Beauty Institute is a showcase for Nathalie Baye, who rode to stardom on a bicycle in Godard's 1979 Every Man for Himself. Since then she has appeared in some 35 films, few worthy of her talent. Earlier this year, the deadly dull An Affair of Love blatantly exploited the desire of her audience to see how, at age 52, she was holding up as French cinema's most unselfconscious sex symbol.
The winner of four C�sar awards, Venus Beauty Institute has a wittier, more finely tuned appreciation of Baye's appeal. First seen behind the plate glass windows of Venus Beaut�, a small Paris day spa, she looks somewhat sad and wan, her hair hanging limply about the collar of her peach uniform. Baye plays Ang�le, a beautician who's at least 20 years older than her coworkers. Her employer, Madame Nadine (Bulle Ogier), makes a comfortable living by convincing women that facials and dye jobs are a duty rather than an indulgence. She's perplexed that Ang�le doesn't want to follow in her footsteps by opening a salon of her own. But Ang�le is leery of growing up and settling down in both her professional and private life.
Once wounded in a love affair�the extravagant details of which are kept secret for most of the film�Ang�le now limits herself to sexual flings that give her a sense of control, but almost inevitably result in humiliation. Venus Beauty Institute opens with a deftly written scene: Ang�le and the pudgy suburbanite with whom she's spent the weekend are in a railroad station caf�. She puts herself in a vulnerable position by asking to see him again; he uses the opening to brush her off with utmost cruelty. As he piles on the insults about her "flat ass" and her "vulgar aggression," her hurt turns to anger. "This is a democracy, I have equal rights!" she yells as she follows him to his train. "You dump me, I stalk you."
This encounter has been observed by Antoine (Samuel Le Bihan), an attractive, bearish-looking man who's instantly smitten with Ang�le�and wants to rescue her from this bully. (Marshall frames the scene as a triangle with Antoine watching Ang�le over the other man's shoulder, to emphasize the oedipal underpinnings of his feelings.) Antoine fixates on Ang�le as the love of his life and breaks up with his gorgeous 20-year-old fianc�e. His protective impulse mirrors what the audience feels for Ang�le and for Baye. Decorated in sherbet colors that change from pink to blue with the flick of a light switch, the salon is like a miniature movie set. We want our heroine to escape its confines even though we have no idea where she can go next.
Thanks to some brilliant casting, Venus Beauty Institute provokes ideas about women, movies, sexuality, and age that extend beyond its frothy fiction. At least during the first hour, the film thrives on the hilarious girl talk and cameo appearances by such luminaries as Claire Denis, Edith Scob, and especially Robert Hossein as a scarred pilot, who comes to Venus Beaut� to preserve the skin that was grafted from his wife's thighs onto his face. Much to Ang�le's dismay, the pilot, now widowed, becomes enamored of Marie, the youngest beautician (Audrey Tautou). Ang�le enlists Antoine's help in rescuing Marie from the clutches of this much older man. Spying on the lovers, who despite their age difference are well matched, Ang�le is sufficiently turned on to forget, for a brief moment, her misgivings about Antoine. Once they begin groping each other, the movie loses both subtlety and momentum, and its bittersweet tone quickly shades into melodrama. Despite the pressure of the box office, movie sex is often better kept in the head.