This is getting weird. Yesterday I saw a movie in which Jacques Dutronc played classical piano and co-starred with Isabelle Huppert. The film was made in 1979 and pre-figured Merci, pour le chocolate twenty odd years later in which Dutronc is a classical pianist and plays opposite Huppert. Now, something very similar: Years and years ago Woody Allen wrote a play which was later adapted for the screen. It was called Play It Again, Sam, and the premise was that the lead character, Allen himself, held conversations with, and received advice from, Humphrey Bogart, his idol and, at the time the play was written and the film made, deader than Vaudeville. Now, it is Allen himself who enters into 'conversations' with Alice Taglioni who is his number one fan. Apart from that this is either a delightful rom-com or totally unrealistic rubbish depending on if you go to the movies to be entertained and transported for a couple of hours or to suffer unrealistic rubbish. Me? I loved it. Last time I saw Alice Taglioni she was a hard-nosed cop after a serial killer (The Prey) and before that she was the ditsy blonde mistress of Daniel Auteuil in a Francis Weber gem. This has lots of charm going for it and any film that features Ella singing Larry Hart's standout lyric to Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered over the credits with the verse yet cannot be bad and when a little later the lead actress confesses to 'adoring' Cole Porter what's not to like.
Review of Paris-Manhattan
