A bourgeois Parisienne and a brutalized Algerian prostitute find common discontents in Coline Serreau's spin on THELMA & LOUISE. Helene (Catherine Frot) appears to have an enviable life with high-powered businessman Paul (Vincent Lindon). They have a handsome, college-age son, Fabrice (Aurelien Wiik) and a lovely apartment. Helene even has a career to call her own. But she feels restless and insignificant, as though she's been gradually forced into the margins of her own life. A womanizer and a bully, Paul takes Helene for granted and ignores his elderly mother, Mamie (Line Renaud). And when Helene stops by Fabrice's new apartment unexpectedly, only to be assured by his girlfriend (Chloe Lambert) that Fabrice isn't home, Helene releases uncomfortably she's on the receiving end of the same ruse she just pulled on Paul's behalf when Mamie visited unannounced.
Malika (Rachida Brakni), meanwhile, is the daughter of tradition-bound immigrants. Raised in an impoverished housing project, she ran away when her father tried to sell her into marriage to an older man, and wound up an abused and exploitetd hooker. The women's paths cross on a dimly lit side street. From the safety of their car, Helene and Paul see Malika running desperately from two men; Paul instinctively locks the doors, and the men beat Malika viciously. Profoundly disturbed that her husband's primary concern is the blood on his windshield, Helene tracks Malika to the hospital where she lies battered and comatose. Helene channels her atrophied emotional resources into willing Malika back from the twilight of the near-death, and eventually spirits her away from beneath the noses of her persistent pimps.
Even before Helene finally learns the bitter, brutal story of what brought Malika to this desperate pass, she's abandoned her ungrateful family and cast her lot with the younger woman; their band of outsiders expands to include Mamie and Malika's younger sister (Hajar Nouma). This being France, the lost highways don't even seem to stretch into infinity — Helene and Malika's truncated road trip ends at Mamie's country house — but Serreau compensates by entangling Helene's mid-life personal awakening in far-reaching issues of race, class, age, religion and cultural assimilation. Serrau effortlessly navigates the tricky transition from ruefully comic chick flick to gritty crime picture, and while she never embraces the excesses of extreme female bonding espoused by, say, BAISE MOI (2000), she's also fundamentally immune to the cheap allure of walk-on-the-wild-side feminism. (In French with subtitles) leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
