Film Review: Delicacy (12A)

Director: David and Stéphane FoenkinosRunning time: 122 minutes

LAST week, a newspaper column caused something of a flurry by claiming that if a woman is beautiful, all other women will hate her. Apparently the writer had forgotten about Audrey Tautou, because surely everyone loves Tautou – women, men, dogs and, above all, cameras. It’s more than a decade since she starred in Amélie, but all she has to do is pull in her lip, or do the black button-eyed twinkle, and many will swoon all over again.

Delicacy takes full advantage of Tautou’s looks and charm to power a mildly off-beat bonbon in which she plays Nathalie, half of a perfect French couple, until she is abruptly widowed. Grief-stricken, she puts her emotions on hold and buries herself in her work for a Swedish firm, ignoring her lovesick co-workers and a creepy boss (Bruno Todeschini) who doesn’t let his marriage, or presumably France’s sexual harassment laws, stop him making a clumsy pass at her.

Then one day, for no reason in particular, she opts to kiss her bumbling subordinate Markus (Belgian actor François Damiens), sparking off a tentative relationship. Markus’s wardrobe of large comfortable jumpers and too-tight running shorts suggests a man who hasn’t considered himself a romantic figure for quite some time, and during their platonic café meetings and dinners, he admits he feels that he is dating out of his league. “It’s as if Liechtenstein is walking with the USA,” he tells her when they essay a romantic stroll through Paris.

Besides being slobby and awkward, he’s also funny, self-deprecating, and a good listener. Yet Nathalie’s friends are hugely dismayed at the ungainly pairing – chiefly because the film is confecting a lecture about judging books by their covers.

Long before then, the film strips its gears shifting between tragedy, social awkwardness and exaggerated whimsy. For a film called Delicacy, this romantic dramedy marks its emotional milestones with the finesse of the One O’Clock gun. I don’t just mean the way the film telegraphs Tautou’s irresistibility by making the men around her act like a bunch of Yogi Bears spotting a picnic basket, but also Markus’s elation at pulling Tautou, which is turned into a very broad fantasy sequence where he walks down the street imagining himself as a babe-magnet.

Yet despite the heavy-handedness, Delicacy is also weightless, and that’s down to first-time directors David and Stéphane Foenkinos, who adapted David’s novel for the screen. If you don’t have nuance or focus, the result is less like a full-functioning feature film, and more like a failed pilot for an aggressively quirky Sunday night series.

On the plus side, at least Delicacy means us no harm, there’s a nice Girl With The Dragon Tattoo joke, and the leads are likeable. «

Siobhan Synnot

Filmhouse, Edinburgh, Friday until 3 May