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PAULETTE Send This Review to a Friend
Bernadette Lafont, an icon of French Cinema (“Une belle fille comme moi,” “Les bonnes femmes”), who died in 2013 at the age of 74, stars in the frothy comedy “Paulette,” one of her last films. She goes out on a high. Literally. In one of the most unusual roles of her long career, Lafont plays a financially pressed widow who discovers easy money by becoming a neighborhood dealer in hashish. The result is delightfully amusing as this initially foul-mouthed, racist survivor, who starts out as a grandmother from hell, inevitably turns the corner into a likable character. This French import, directed by Jérôme Enrico, was reported to be a hit in France and one can see why.
The combination of politically incorrect racist epithets by Paulette, the change partially brought about by her black grandson who wins her over after she has told him she doesn’t like him because he is black, and the spectacle of Paulette and her elderly cronies taking to the drug trade among the hardened dealers in the outskirts of Paris make for a series of freshly offbeat comic episodes. The screenplay (scenario and adaptation by Bianca Olsen, Laurie Aubanel, Cyril Rambour and Enrico) strains to pull the plot together and keep the basic gag going, but there is plenty to laugh at along the way, and Lafont brings to life the character of Paulette with the skill that she has exhibited through her long career stemming from the days of the French New Wave.
There will be those likely to bristle at Paulette’s racist behavior and vocabulary at the start of the film, but that’s the point. She shuns her daughter Agnes (Axelle Laffont) because she has married a black cop, the good-natured Ousmane (Jean-Baptiste Anoumon). She resents that their child, cute seven-year-old Leo (Ismaël Dramé) is black. She loathes those who get government aid and scrounges in garbage rather than seeking help herself. Of course, we know she has to change.
The film emerges as sprightly comedy after Paulette observes drug-dealing and brashly offers her services, thus starting to rake in cash. Believable? Maybe not, but the humor works. When Leo innocently stirs dope into Paulette’s baking (in earlier days she ran a bakery), her women friends, entertainingly played by Dominique Lavanant, Carmen Maura and Françoise Bertin, get giddily high. Paulette has the nerve to demand more money from the local drug lords but the alliance is jeopardized when a kingpin wants her to sell drug-laden cookies to children. That she will not do.
“Paulette” reminds me of some of the British Ealing comedies with Alec Guinness. The characters here are amusing and there is lighthearted, escapist fun. In addition, there are contemporary social underpinnings of have-not lives. Paulette has the determination to find a way ito cope on her own terms. Meanwhile, she must contend with an ardent neighbor Walter (André Penvern), who pursues her romantically. The film is also populated with an array of satirized tough-guy types.
It is refreshing to encounter this unusual comedy from France, especially when it provides the opportunity to see Lafont in latter life starring as a colorful character with all her no-holds-barred contradictions. A Cohen Media Group release. Reviewed August 9, 2015.
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