Mon pire cauchemar (2011)
Directed by Anne Fontaine

Film Review

For some people, Anne Fontaine's latest fumbling attempt at a social satire could well be their worst nightmare.  Take three grossly overpaid actors (all, arguably, past their prime), plonk them in a hideously contrived narrative that has scarcely an original idea in it, and marinate for roughly ninety minutes in a thick sauce of well-worn clichés until the resultant sickly residue is well and truly indigestible.  Mon pire cauchemar is as vacuous and predictable as it is stale and distasteful, and it is hard to discern so much of a glimmer of calculated irony or genuine human feeling behind the barefaced caricature that Fontaine falls back on as a lazy substitute for true-to-life characterisation.

It is hard to imagine how a film that brings together Isabelle Huppert, Benoît Poelvoorde and André Dussollier could go so badly wrong, but Fontaine's chief mistake was to assign each of these actors to roles that are so obviously a crude amalgam of the ones they are most associated with.  Huppert is the frigid dominatrix bourgeois sophisticate with a perverse streak, Poelvoorde the foul mouthed uneducated pleb who keeps his brains in his underpants and Dussollier the maritally oppressed bourgeois intellectual who pounces on the first pretty young thing that comes his way.  Imagine how much more interesting the film might have been if Huppert and Poelvoorde's roles had been reversed, with Huppert playing the gobby tramp to Poelvoorde's snobby art promoter!  If only the characters had been allowed to develop, if only their stereotypical class traits had been mere surface affectation, the film might have had some merit.  But no, what you see is what you get - Fontaine would rather have fun playing with crude stereotypes in a grotesque parody of an American rom-com than deal with real people and real emotions in real situations.  Alas, the humour is as strained and torturous as the plot and, after a promising start, Mon pire cauchemar soon becomes wearisome to the point that it does end up feeling like your worst nightmare.

Film Synopsis

Agathe Dambreville leads a comfortable bourgeois existence with her publisher husband François and their teenage son.  Patrick lives alone with his son in the back of a van.  Agathe manages a prestigious foundation of contemporary art.  Patrick just about gets by with state handouts and odd jobs.  They have nothing in common, so it is hardly surprising that they fail to hit it off.  Their paths would never have crossed had it not been for the fact their sons attend the same school and have become the best of friends.  Blissfully unaware that her husband has begun an affair with a younger woman, Agathe finds herself seeing Patrick more often than their social circumstances would appear to allow...