Looking For Hortense - film review

If you had to make up a parody title for a French drawing-room comedy, you’d be hard pressed to do better than Looking for Hortense. It sounds vaguely elegant but meaningless, and Pascal Bonitzer’s well-acted, well-mannered film waits a long while to tell us who the titular Hortense is. Even after that less-than-momentous revelation, you may well find yourself struggling to determine what this exceedingly bourgeois tale of minor mid-life crises is actually about.

For the first few scenes, at least, it appears to be about Kristin Scott Thomas’s frizzy-haired, brittle-nerved theatre director Iva, a woman at the end of a listless relationship with dry business etiquette consultant Damien (Jean-Pierre Bacri) and on the brink of an affair with her dishy leading man. Rather abruptly, however, the focus switches permanently to Damien and his own steamy problems: he dallies chastely with a gamine young waitress, while badgering his father, a High Court judge, with the visa issues of an unseen family friend.

Before long, Iva is all but written out of proceedings — a pity, since Scott Thomas, who presumably shot this in a weekend between other, more pressing projects, is easily the best thing here. Always so good with characters caught in moral quandaries, she gives this floaty film its few scenes of tangible hurt and emotional consequence. Elsewhere, the stakes are uniformly low — even for the illegal immigrant, whose case, we are told, isn’t that urgent. Bonitzer is a lithe, literate writer who has penned screenplays for greats such as Jacques Rivette and André Téchiné but it seems he doesn’t save his best ideas for himself.