If you missed the opportunity to catch some light comedies at Cinefranco on Saturday, you can still do so tomorrow (Sunday) and all through this week.

BlogUTs picks for Sunday are the light romantic comedy Tricheuse/So Woman! at 7:15PM (reviewed below), the great Costa Gravas’s (director of the chilling but brilliant Missing) drama, East of Eden at 3:00PM, and Le Petit Nicolas, a family-appropriate comedy at 5:15PM, based on the nostalgic children’s books by René Goscinny, which I enjoyed very much  as a child.

Tricheuse (or So Woman! by its English title) has a recycled plot, very similar to Peter Weir’s Green Card, which itself was nothing new, about Clemence, who convinces her immigrant piano tuner, Farid, whose name she can’t remember or pronounce, to bring his two daughters to live with her so she can fake being married in order to secure her apartment and a lucrative litigation job which she needs to salvage her career. Since the piano tuner can barely afford electricity, he gets something out of the deal. Of course, they fight initially as their personalities and cultures clash: she is self-absorbed, superficial, and has a proclivity for boy toys, while he is the ultimate family man who cooks and cares for his daughter. But in the end, they fall in love, and all the conventions of a romantic comedy are met.

Tricheuse is a sweet film and a funny film and there are many scenes of mistaken identities worth a watch. For example, when Clemence’s landlord asks what Farid does for a living, she makes up a wild lie that he is a great sculptor; the building then requests that he make a sculpture for the courtyard and so Farid uses bicycles, toasters, and other objects to craft something similar to one of Clemence’s modern art sculptures in her apartment. When Clemence teaches the eldest how to write an essay, her teacher claims that plagiarism must be at work, so Clemence comes into the school to defend her as a parent and a lawyer. There are also moments of drama when Clemence gets Farid’s daughters to open up to her about their mother and they bond, though sometimes these feel a little emotionally forced.

Tricheuse is not a great film, but despite its predictability, it has some unexpected sophistication and turns, which make it a light enjoyable see for a Sunday afternoon.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2010 at 12:12 am and is filed under Events, Film, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.