Word: cousine
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...Giants aren't even the New York Giants anymore, even though they really are (something of a travesty, something of a shame), and they really just don't have it in them to win anyway. It was an event, a big event, like the wedding of a distant cousin, and you had to be there...
...also have the running joke of Cousin, Cousine, Jean-Charles Tacchella's new romantic comedy. Throughout the movie, various inter-family assemblages, from funerals to Christmas eve parties, act as catalysts for, among other things, adultery, sex education, fist-fights, and, most important, the affair between two cousins that makes up the film's romantic content. The tone is consistently ebullient, the acting good and a few of the scenes are hilarious. But I think the critical raves this movie has garnered are all out of proportion to the small, if genuine, pleasures actually to be found...
Despite the buoyancy Tacchella successfully distills from the group scenes, Cousin, Cousine doesn't live up to its billing as a winsome masterpiece, largely because the amorous cousins, played by Marie Christine Barrault and Victor Lanoux, are au fond too shallow. While no one would demand a trenchant political or psychological comment from romantic comedy, we do expect two distinct and compelling personalities whose collision will charm or amuse us. Maybe I'm prejudiced by American films (especially the screwball variety), but I want more quirkiness and spunk from the leads. Although Barrault and Lanoux are frequently endearing...
...lured into raising these issues, seemingly irrelevant to a light romantic comedy, because Cousin, Cousine contains enough dramatic power and directorial sophistication to go, if only occasionally, beyond the limits of the genre. At times Tacchella's characters beg to be taken seriously, but in the end he always seems to be more comfortable with group scenes and visual humor. No one in Cousin, Cousine is witty--Tacchella wouldn't allow a character that freedom. He prefers to draw back and let us laugh at people and situations--a man with his pants down at a formal dinner, a woman...
...Cousin, Cousine's final image epitomizes Tacchella's approach. Abandoned by the magician and his audience, a woman who is supposed to have been sawn in half cries out to be released from half a trunk. If Tacchella wants us to be truly involved with his films, he will have to let his people...