Vénus beauté (institut)
Tags: romantic

Plot synopsis:
Angèle is a 40-year-old beautician who works at the title establishment in Paris. She has been an orphan from the age of eight, her father having killed her mother for suspected infidelity, and then killed himself when her infidelity was proved untrue. She picks up men to have short sex flings, but no longer believes in love, having hurt her former boyfriend, Jacques, whom she occasionally contacts out of loneliness, but who is never available at the same time as her. An unkempt younger man, Antoine, sees her at a cafe as she is being dumped by her latest fling, and falls in love with her. He stands outside the beauty shop to watch for Angèle, follows her to a café and declares his love for her, but she for once is lost for words and does not immediately return his feelings. Antoine also reveals that despite his feelings for her, he is engaged, but feels he is drifting away from his fiancée. However, despite her refusal to believe in love, Angèle gradually falls for Antoine.
Venus Beauty Institute is run by Nadine, and Angèle's co-workers include Samantha, who has a string of dates and gives Angèle their descriptions, and Marie, the youngest who is still learning the ropes. The co-workers' love lives contrast with Angèle's. Marie has as her client an aging pilot, who had been burnt and had his face reconstructed from his late wife's skin. The pilot wants Marie to come to his house, which she eventually does, watched by Angèle and Antoine. Angèle is concerned that Marie is too naïve and that the pilot invited her to his house to seduce her. As Marie and the pilot begin to make love, Angèle and Antoine start kissing.
Christmas is approaching, and Angèle goes to her aunts in Poitiers. Antoine had revealed that he is a sculptor, and had been commissioned to do an altarpiece for the cathedral there. She goes the cathedral to see the artwork, but changes her mind when an old friend recognizes her. Returning to Paris, Angèle goes to the hospital to visit Samantha, who tried to commit suicide out of loneliness over Christmas. Samantha reveals that Nadine is starting a new store, and that she found a new girl to temporarily replace Samantha. However, the new girl, Evelyne, turns out to be a disaster, wanting to arrange the products by colour rather than function, and eventually quits.
Meanwhile, Antoine's fiancée had followed him and seen him leave the store with Angèle. She goes to the store as a client, and confides to Angèle that her fiancé is seeing someone else, but she thinks he still loves her. Later, when Antoine takes Angèle shopping, Antoine's fiancée comes into the store; Angèle sees them together and thinks Antoine has betrayed her. She phones Antoine to tell her call their relationship off. To make amends, as Angèle is left to close the store on New Year's Eve, Antoine comes to the store with a present. It is a new dress. Antoine's fiancée sees this and comes into the store with a gun, but when she fires all she succeeds in hitting is the lights. As the sparks fly, Antoine and Angèle kiss each other.

Review: Venus Beauté Institut is clearly one of the best films of the year in France, and not due to the fact it won the César as best film; it truly is a good film, contrary to what many people think.
The story is also quite simple, but anyone (including men) can relate to it, for it deals with the most common human emotions: love, loneliness, friendship, sorrow, and happiness; and what's truly inspiring is the simple and humorous way these emotions have been conveyed.
Nathalie Baye was superb as the lonely Angèle, and the entire supporting cast is excellent: the socialite and oppressive Madame Nadine (Bulle Ogier), the sweet and naive Marie (Audrey Tautou), the troubled Samanthe (Mathilde Seigner), and the breathtaking Madame Buisse (Claire Nadeau).
Also, this is not the typical art house French film that many people detest, it is a very simple human statement, wonderfully taken to the screen.I recommend it..
It's not quite an ensemble piece because there is a main character.Nathalie Baye plays a 40-year-old woman, Angèle, who is going from one fling to another.
She's a very attractive woman but looks sad all the time and her friends notice.Audrey Tautou plays Marie, another worker at the salon, and she's a plain country girl who starts having an affair with a much older man.
Mathilde Seigner plays Samantha, who is tough on the outside and has lots of boyfriends, but is hurting inside (she tries to kill herself on Christmas Eve).But Angèle is the focus of this film.
Along comes Antoine, a much younger man, who saw the spat at the train station and who follows Angèle back to where she works.
Angèle isn't interested in a relationship and Antoine isn't interested in casual sex, so things don't look good for the pair.
But as the story progresses, she opens up to him and by the end they're both in love with each other.I would have liked the film more than I did if the character of Antoine had been different.
But he is open and tender, and Angèle is vulnerable and needs some extra care, so maybe that's the key.Anyway, the characters were all interesting and the acting well-done.
There was a tender poignancy in the relationships between the people in the beauty shop and their customers, as well as some pretty funny scenes, and the film explores some adult themes about the nature of love and relationships, so I would definitely recommend this one even if it might have been better..
This stars Nathalie Baye, not Audrey Tautou, of Amélie (2001) fame.
(She has a supporting role.) Baye is Angèle, a 40-year-old Parisian beautician who has loved and lost a few too many times.
Indeed, as the film opens we (and Samuel Le Bihan as Antoine) watch and hear her being dumped once again.
He wants her fully in control of her faculties.So this is a romantic comedy of sorts centered around a beauty parlor.
Here the salon is brightly and colorfully lit with a tinker bell as the door opens, and the clientele are eclectic to say the least: an exhibitionist who arrives in a raincoat and nothing else; a rich old man lusting after Tautou; a woman with oozing pimples on her...(never mind)...etc.What makes this work so well is a completely winning performance by Baye, sharp direction by Toni Marshall, and a kind of quirky and blunt realism that eschews all cliché.
She makes us identify with her character and she makes us wish her love.(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!).
Nathalie Baye, as Angèle, plays a 40ish beautician in Paris.
Then a man obsessively falls for her and she has to decide whether to open up to love, or at least the possibility of it.
Some pieces of Angèle's past never quite get explained or resolved, which some people might complain about, but, hey, life is a lot like that.This film is set in Paris, right before and right after Christmas.
(I also saw "La Buche" at the same theater, also set in Paris at Christmas, also very good)The jazzy score is particularly nice.This is not exactly an upbeat Christmas movie, but it's well worth seeing..
When a Middle Age Woman Finds Love Again.
In Paris, Angèle (Nathalie Baye) is a beautician working in the beauty parlor 'Venus Beauty Institute', owned by Natalie (Bulle Ogier).
Her colleagues are Samantha (Mathilde Seigner) and Marie (Audrey Tautou) and they have a good relationship in the salon.
Angèle has an emotional problem with men and she does not believe in love anymore.
Angèle meets Antoine (Samuel Le Bihan), a sculptor who has a crush with her, but the bitter and heartbroken Angèle has problems to believe on his love.
I liked this romance about a heartbroken middle age woman finding love again.
First, because of the great performance of the beautiful Nathalie Baye, who was fifty-one years old in 1999.
The story has some ups and downs, with some shallow situations, like the exhibitionist client who walks naked in the beauty shop, but the balance is very positive.
VENUS BEAUTY features France's fabulous Nathalie Baye, entering middle-age, as is her character (Angle) in this dramatic comedy.
The Venus Beauty Salon is the location for this interesting personality study, not only of Ms. Bayes' character, but also of the personalities of her clients, admirers and co-workers.
The film functions very well as a French modern slice-of-life study, across age, income, gender and social groups.
Ms. Baye is aided by an excellent supporting cast including Samuel Le Bihan as her love interest.
The movie really draws us into the lives of those who inhabit or pass through the Venus Beauty Institute, a microcosm of Parisian life in the 90's..
Angèle works in a Paris beauty salon with the ingénue-like Marie and cynical Samantha.
The film charts Angèle's own progress from embittered divorcée to feeling human being through her pursuit by the love-smitten sculptor, Antoine.We first see Angèle chatting up a total stranger in a railway buffet.
She picks up men for casual sex because her faith in the possibility of love left her when her marriage failed (actually she shot her husband, though not fatally).
It is ironic, therefore, that a strikingly similar crime of passion causes a turnaround, but enough said for now.What delights most of all in this film is Nathalie Baye's performance.
She invests Angèle with the vulnerability that we have glimpsed in the past, but which carries before it a prickly resilience necessary for survival.Another great pleasure is the portrait of the beauty salon milieu, which lays bare -rather than covers up - human foibles with typical Gallic frankness.
Nadine tells Angèle: 'When you're not a girl any more, you'd better decide not to be a girl any more.' Samantha is promiscuous but, unlike Angèle, allows her disappointments to affect her professional life, which brings her into conflict with Nadine.
But significantly when she tells Nadine where to go, while we may sympathise more with Samantha, Nadine is not made to look petty by comparison (it is possible to imagine how an American film would handle this scene very differently).
No one is happy.Clearly the sculptor, with his undemanding love, is the key for Angèle (and many another single female, no doubt!) but just how the film makes the transition from her morose rebuttals to melting acceptance is one aspect in which you may feel it betrays its Mike Leigh-style realism by opting for an ending which is too whimsical.
We hope this does not spoil the many other qualities of Marshall's film.By the same director: If you enjoy Vénus Beauté you would certainly like Tonie Marshall's earlier feature, Pas très catholique..
Netflix described this movie as follows: "With "Venus Beauty Institute," French writer and director Tonie Marshall takes us into this world of beauty and self image and into the lives of four strong, smart woman who make their living practicing beauty at a Parisian spa."I was waiting throughout the entire movie for a glimpse of a strong woman...every woman in the entire movie seemed to me to be needy, insecure, wounded, angry, naive, or self destructive.
"Venus Beauty Institute" tells of 40+ Angele (Baye), who  prefers one night stands or "flings", as she calls them, to normal heterosexual relationships and love, and her lack of success with men.
In addition to never being given a reason to care about Angele one way or the other, the audience will find much of this film dedicated to superfluous girl talk about the this and that of their lives and vocations.
Nathalie Baye illuminates any film she cares to grace - as do so many French actresses, Isabelle Carre, Sabine Azema, Carole Bouquet, Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Kiberlain, etc - and this time around for good measure she has great support from the likes of Bulle Ogier, Audrey Tatou (pre- Amelie and relatively unknown) and Mathilde Seignier.
Even with a gun to my head I couldn't pick out a bad performance and writer-director Toni Marshall is going to have a hard time eclipsing this one.
Love this film.
In fact all the girls seem to dois apply (and try to sell) products (it's a good running gag).This film is rather like Victoria Wood's British seriesDinnnerladies, with an ensemble cast of wonderful actressesincluding cameos from some grande dames of the theatre/cinema.
this film (or should i say movie) was one of the most trite unentertaining pieces of garbage i have ever seen.
I kept wondering if this was an attempt at american film making by a french director.
perhaps the worst french film ever made (but its hard to say due to Man Bites Dog).
There's something almost cloyingly twee about 'Venus Beauty Institute',  a romantic drama constructed around a series of encounters between the  staff of a Paris beauty salon and their clients.
The problem is not so  much with the individual vignette, which are generally well  observed and acted, but rather in the underpinning notion that all life  can be neatly sampled through such a prism, each set-piece topped and  tailed by the ghastly sound generated each time the shops's doors are  opened.
There's even an early role for Audrey Tautou, which provides  one clue as to the tone of the film.
However, the movie is definitely a  cut above the likes of 'Bridget Jones' Diary', principally because of  the fine performance of Nathalie Baye in the central role.
There's little real  plot that can't be foreseen, but thanks to Baye (and the understated  direction of Tonie Marshall), this is a more interesting movie than  most in its genre..
SHe has an old flame who appears now and again and a younger man who pesters her constantly promising to give up his much younger fiancée for her.I found it slow at times but funny t others, all be it the comedy is French and so a bit surreal.
The characters are poorly defined in some ways, especially the younger parlour worker, maybe the story about her and the older man could be explored further.Overall, worth watching and has encouraged me to investigate more French films.
What a lovely little film for the cynical romantic!
I'm less-then-satisfied with the likes of films such as "Runaway Bride" et al.
I love a good movie, a movie that draws you in - and have no interest in "chick flicks", however this one comes very close to filling that void - a thinking woman's "chick flick".
Very fantastical, yet this film has enough to it to believe that the stories it tells just might unfold 'in real life' as they have in this film..
If this movie has been selected as the best film of the year by French Academy, I don't want to think about the other movies.
Venus Beauté Institute is the best movie I have seen this year.
Lots of girl talk: love with a hard edge; like it is.
Take that, of course, for comic relief, but there is much more to this film.I think there IS a real love story here.
We call it "casual sex."Angele works as a beautician because she "likes to help people."  Or maybe she does because she disfigured an important lover in the past, and is still making amends.
She has the sacrificed the "head over heels" kind of loving that is so energizing and young-making.We join Angele's life at that moment of change, when someone comes along and gives her back what she has been dishing out.
And in effect, this is where the love story begin, and where the film starts to pay off.Although we learn later that her suitor, Antoine, has a nice body, he does not present to her the dark, ruthless, knowing, three-hour bang that she's used to.
This makes it easier to blow him off, to comprehend him as a younger man with "an obsession" -- her words -- rather than an answer to her unasked question.That's something else I liked about the film.
Besides depicting the hard life of people deciding whether to take yet another risk on love in middle age, the film both by words and silences points up how many questions are not asked.
The writers and director, keep you ahead of the game, so you usually see what questions should be on the table.Arriving at the set-up point of this film, we see that Angele's question should be, "just how much longer can I nourish myself with one-night stands before I get in trouble, or my partner pool deteriorates, or I have to start giving little gifts, or the inhumanity of it all makes me drink too much, etc."But soon after, other questions percolate to the top.
The positive and cumulative results of these bits and pieces signaled to me that this film was driving towards a good outcome, as opposed to a romantic tragedy of roads not taken or plans not met.'You should f*ck more and plan less," says one of Angele's more disagreeable men.
I enjoyed this film in ways that made me indirectly think of HBO's "Sex in the City." Not just for the frank discussions, nor for the fact that I preferred the women just talking amongst themselves (coworkers together, and also coworkers with clients) rather than interacting with the men in their lives..."Sex in the City" flipped more than a few stereotypes, and in "Venus" we find the lead character a woman who has grown weary and too jejune for "je taime".
We see men in films like this...and watch as somehow they are wooed back to vivaciousness, but not often do we see similar women.I mean, I don't *really* think Stella ever lost her groove, it was more like she knew it was under the blankets on the floor.
But Nathalie Baye's fallen Angele is past searching for Mister Right, she's hooking up with a series of Monsieur Wrong Nows.
Light spoilers follow...I'd recommend seeing this film, and I would echo what another reviewer stated, this probably will be appreciated by a slightly older audience.
Mishima liked his women to have a flaw, although he was more partial to a physical one to set off the pure beauty...the same axiom can be applied to personality traits.
That scene is doubly voyeuristic, and her *small* role here hits about 11 on the naif scale.Tautou is gorgeous no doubt, but for those of you who spend all your time slow-motioning her strip-tease, you are skipping over the real beauty of Venus, Baye's performance here is a gem...with some defining blemishes.
In the film, she works at the Venus Beauty Salon but the film actually centers on Nathalie Baye and her rather bizarre life.
Ms. Tautou is clearly a supporting actress, but following the amazing success of her film "Amélie", unscrupulous people changed the box art to make it look like it was a starring role for her.
For her part, however, he is probably at her most radiant and sensual.As for the film, it's about period of several months in the life of Baye.
Baye plays a middle-aged sexually compulsive woman who loves casual sex but is deeply afraid of a deeper commitment.
In the midst of this very screwed up relationship, you see the co-workers in their relationships, though these are never explored in the same depth as Baye's.If you are looking for some depth or meaning in this film, I sure couldn't find any.
While some might see Baye as a "work in progress" and by the end of the film she's finally found happiness, this isn't clearly established and based on her life so far, this seemed unlikely.
I certainly hope nobody sees this film and thinks Baye is a role model or even particularly likable.
However, it is a well done portrait of a very flawed woman and the acting is very good--just not particularly pleasant.By the way, there is quite a bit of explicit nudity in this film, as one of the customers is an exhibitionist.
Nathalie Baye is on the screen in almost every scene, and it's never too much.
But the real treat is in the story.The main character, Angèle, is a beautician who is afraid to fall in love, because she's been hurt too much in the past.
A new man tells her he's in love -- the last thing she wants to hear from a man.
She's 40, but the story would have worked for a person of any age.
(I saw the movie at a Seattle International Film Festival screening.
Director Tonie Marshall told us in the audience that she had Nathalie Baye in mind as the star, and wrote the character to fit her.) But I can't say much more about the main plot without spoilers.While the story is centered on Angèle, there are several other interesting characters, mainly her co-workers (particularly young, innocent Marie) and some interesting regular clients (particularly the comical Madame Buisse).While the story is mainly a romantic comedy, there is some drama.