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EVERYBODY'S FAMOUS Send This Review to a Friend
Despite moments of amusement, this film from Belgium, in Flemish with English subtitles, never rises to become sharp enough to be more than a mild bit of satire on what lengths people will go to for fame and fortune. Marva, played with smiling innocence by Eva Van Der Gucht, is a chunky young lady of 17 who wants to be a singer but has more heart than talent and is a pathetic loser in the contests she repeatedly enters. But her conniving dad Jean (Josse De Pauw) is brimming with hope.
Jean persists in composing dumb songs that he hopes will be her ticket to success one day, and he keeps trying to get her a big chance. Jean loses his factory job, as does his younger friend Willy (Werner de Smedt) and events lead to their kidnapping of sexy pop star Debbie (Thekla Reuten--the actress you see in advertisements for the film). The idea is to extract ransom, but the situation takes a bizarre turn. With the missing Debbie a top item in the news, her manager Michael (Victor Low) finds a publicity gold mine in the situation and motivated by his own duplicitous scheme, he becomes the key to Marva getting her big chance.
By this time the film may have exhausted you, and "Lucky Manuelo," Jean's song that Marva gets to sing as her ticket to potential success is so awful that anything positive is hard to believe. Even though director Dominique Deruddere's film is essentially a spoof and offers the occasional chuckle, it also is pure corn and sentimentally asks us to root for the untalented Marva and her obsessive father. "Everybody's Famous," strained and provincial, wears the badge of having been a foreign film Oscar nominee, which is just as inexplicable as the success of Marva singing "Lucky Manuelo." A Miramax Films release.
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