Never take your holiday in Surrey or Hollywood

Rating: 9/10 (22 January 2009)

Don't jump to the ceiling yet, don't get up into the sky. That's not the film of the next century, nor decade. That's not even the comedy of the present decade. It is just a decent comedy, romantic, sentimental and happy to the highest uppermost acme of what we can conceive as a happy ending. In fact the structure is Shakespearian to the very detail in every scene. "As You like It" is the model and here we are even nearly modest, shy about the happy ending. Shakespeare managed to have four marriages at the end of his play, and he will do it again at the end of his "A Midsummer Night's Dream". Here we have only two couples who find their happy ending in England, because frankly such a thing cannot happen in Los Angeles the country of fake make-believe. The real stuff can only happen in the depth of Surrey, with a cow in the back garden and a tent in the girl's bedroom. But it is funny and at the same time it is slightly ironically critical of what Hollywood has become in its superficial illusionary virtual reality based on special effects and canned sentiments and roles, when it is not preserved music that comes out of the brain of an elevator, even if the British may call that a lift that can lift your fat, flesh and bones but will never lift, not to speak of elevating, your artistic and musical senses. And to prove his point, the director, though I should say directress to be accurate even if that is not politically correct and I cannot use a word like directing person that has not yet succeeded to escalator-ize itself up to the tip of my tongue, has a cameo of an aging Dustin Hoffman appearing in the aisles of a DVD store in the background of "The Graduate" where he was a juicy short student looking for the way to lose his maidenhead or should I say bachelor-head between the legs of a ripe woman. Maybe Hollywood might be becoming in the coming decade realistic and more human, closer to real life, probably under the influence of the competition that is already simmering in India, in China, in Asia in general, and in Europe of course, though Europe is still bogged up in the mud of the tradition of cultural protectionism which is nothing but the impotence in front of the challenge that comes from outside. A funny film and a question at the end: how in hell are they going to fly a cow from London's Heathrow Airport to Los Angeles International Airport? I guess Air France will volunteer since they are the European specialist of the air-lift of all kinds of cattle in between two strikes when the passengers are treated by the striking personnel as samples of the valueless cattle that deserves nothing but being sent to the local slaughterhouse to get out of the way of their resistance to change and restructuring, just before the company is bought up by Air China or Aeroflot, now Russian millionaires are buying newspapers in France, and elsewhere.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines