A photographer in The Valet, Francis Veber’s new film is perhaps the only villain in this hilarious movie that will open in April, if such a comedy about a cheating, prominent husband Pierre Lavasseur (Daniel Auteuil) can be said to have one. Catnip for the paparazzi, he is captured on the street with his beautiful model mistress Elena (Alice Taglioni). We see her on the runway featuring a cameo by designer Karl Lagerfeld. Fearing divorce, Lavasseur must now convince his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) that another man, a passerby, is really Elena’s boyfriend. The escalading deception implicates a hapless young man, a parking attendant, in love with a young woman, the daughter of a prominent doctor above his social class.
Veber is a master at comedy, evidenced in his films The Dinner Game and The Closet, but mostly in person. A part-time resident of Los Angeles, he is tanned and tailored. I asked about the brilliant casting of Kristin Scott Thomas who in this film and in Guillaume Canet’s thrilling "Tell No One" speaks impeccable French. Veber laughed stating that he got her in a moment of vulnerability, when she was divorcing her husband, a prominent gynecologist.
Of course if you are King Lear, played expertly obstinate and vulnerable by Kevin Kline in a revival at The Public Theater, you want daughters who fawn on you as you dole out the real estate. This excellent production also features the sons of Glouchester, another wrong-headed father, with Timothy D. Stickney as maddened Edgar and a commanding and “hot” Logan Marshall-Green as the conniving Edmund. The greedy, sycophantic sisters (Angela Pierce and Laura Odeh) swoon in his arms; the women, unfortunately fade in comparison to the fine men, particularly Cordelia (Kristen Bush), the honest and “true” child who returning as a warrior should, in the best of all possible plays, have more presence. The staging, all clanging ramparts and metal over sandy floors, especially in the stormy denouement where Lear accompanied by his Fool sees the light, is simply awesome. In an after-show discussion the actors revealed: the ground is actually pulverized cork and not dangerous to anyone’s health; the magic of onstage eye gouging remains a secret. The squeamish beware.
But if you really want to know what men want, check out Andre Aciman’s first novel, Call Me By Your Name (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). In conversation with Colm Toibin at The New York Public Library last week, the writer, known for his memoirs, Out of Egypt and False Papers, seemed surprised at the openly gay author’s praise of his most heated prose—and the invention of some sex acts. Whatever anyone says, the Proustian influenced Aciman knows all is in the desire:
“I longed to touch his knees and wrists when they glistened in the sun... loved how his white tennis shorts seemed perpetually stained by the color of clay... that his billowy blue shirt promised to harbor a scent of skin and sweat that made me hard just thinking of it.”
Positively titillating. Regina Weinreich
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