Triangulation: Josiane Balasko (left), Victoria Abril and Alain Chabat in "French Twist"A lesbian visitor upends a marriage in 'French Twist'
By Richard von Busack
It's easy to laugh out loud at French Twist, which provides a gratifying plot, two perky leads and some very frothy sauce for the gander. In director/writer/star Josiane Balasko's story of a cheated wife's pleasing revenge, Victoria Abril plays Loli, mistress of a comfortable home in the middle-class part of the south of France. Her husband (Alain Chabat) has been busy with the other local women.
One day, a VW van breaks down in front of Loli's house. The driver, Marijo (Balasko), is a drummer in a lesbian band, currently homeless in a genteel sort of way. Marijo is stocky and resolute but humorous and gray at the temples, much like George Reeves as Superman. Loli, rejected and vulnerable, is less strong than steel and easily bent in Marijo's hands. All it takes is a marijuana cigarette and a few inquiries into her birth sign, and this housewife is consoled, much to the rage of the husband. As the saying goes, when it comes to payback, the perfect man for the job is a woman. Since farce is built with stones of marriage, just as prisons are built with bricks of law, the balance at the end of French Twist is righted back into domestic bliss. French Twist is not a revolutionary film, but it's rousingly funny, with the odd touch of pathos. Balasko played the supposed frump in Bertrand Blier's Too Beautiful for You, in which she played the plump mistress of a business man with a too-perfect wife. Blier was studying the anatomy of desire. French Twist, by contrast, is plain farce: sexual freedom is great, but on the other hand, too much of it might be bad for you. Still, the film is very quick and malicious, the way farce ought to be, and the delightful Abril, who starred in a few of Almodovar's comedies, has that helpless, befuddled sexiness of the classic dirty farce--that modest dismay of a heroine whose clothes have mysteriously vanished.
French Twist (R; 107 min.), directed and written by Josiane Balasko, and starring Balasko, Victoria Abril and Alain Chabat.[ Metro | Metroactive Central ]
From the Feb. 28-Mar. 6, 1996 issue of Metro
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