Review of Look at Me (2004) by Budge B — 10 Mar 2009

There is an essential self-reflexive theme running through this film: art may enrich society, but does it enrich the artist? Literary fiction may aspire to an understanding of the human condition, but does the novelist really understand people? Comparisons have been made between director Agnes Jaoui and Woody Allen, and you can see some parallels in the level of philosophical, aesthetic, and sociological enquiry which underpins the action.

Crucially, however, you are often left wondering who is the star of the film. Lolita is a pretty (or plain) young woman who is conscious that she is overweight and who is struggling to build a career as a singer. Her father is a successful novelist who seems to have devoted most of his life to ignoring her. Lolita (and there's an obvious pun in the name), craves his attention, his respect, his love. She wants to be noticed. But she is noticed only when people identify her as the daughter of the great man.

"Look at Me" ('Comme une Image' - like a picture, like an image), however, finds its narrative dynamism in the tale of two novelists - the one famous but racked by an inability to find further inspiration, the other initially struggling then catapulted into the limelight through his wife's use of Lolita's influence. Neither appears able to understand the people around him. Or are they just blinded by success, so blinded they become self-obsessed and unable to see beyond than their own fame, their own image?

Lolita's father devotes more attention to his phone than he does to her. She becomes an artefact, a series of events in his life to be patronised from time to time. He can see the talent in another writer, but is unaware that his own daughter might have talent of her own. He is rude, overbearing, self-centred, and a dried husk of the creative writer he used to be. He shares something with his daughter - fear. He worries he might never write another word, she worries about her forthcoming performance.

The film moves at slow pace - very elegantly, very stylishly. The performances are faultless - and the 'making of extra' which accompanies the DVD emphasises just how much effort went into getting things right. It's a very accomplished, very engaging, and ultimately very rewarding film, but don't let comparisons with Woody Allen lull you into expecting a comedy. Agnes Jaoui delivers a film which is less a comedy of middle class mores and more a dissection of the sociology of art. Not a film which will be to everyone's taste, but sophisticated, charming, and absorbing.