Reviews and notes

Where does self-delusion end and lying begin? And how much do our deepest feelings correspond to old songs we retain that pop into our minds at the oddest moments? These and other less-than-burning questions are contemplated in Alain Resnais' buoyant film, SAME OLD SONG, a contemporary musical comedy about real estate, agoraphobia, hypochondria and Parisian tourist landmarks, among other topics.

The movie is the noted French director's affectionate tribute to English dramatist and screenwriter Dennis Potter. It uses fragments of old recordings in much the same way that Potter did in movies like Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective. By having his characters burst into lip-synched song to express their inner lives, Potter underscored the delirious irrationality of emotion and the zest for life in a way that conventional movie narratives rarely do.

In SAME OLD SONG, directed from a screenplay by Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, Resnais puts his own stamp on the technique. Instead of conjuring period and genre as they do in Potter's work, the film's musical fragments gleaned from everything from scratchy music-hall recordings to hard-edged contemporary pop help draw out the characters' personalities and reveal truths that they struggle to conceal or deny. Men sometimes sing in women's voices and women in men's. Some of the musical interludes last no longer than two or three seconds, while others are extended soaring choruses.

Because so many of the songs are intensely romantic in a classic Gallic mode, SAME OLD SONG also suggests a psychologically convoluted variation of Jacques Demy's candy-colored singing-and-dancing bonbons, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort. Here, as in the Demy musicals, love is what makes the world go 'round, even when that love is uncertain or duplicitous.

The story follows six characters around Paris as they negotiate their relationships and play games that involve prevarication. Odile (Sabine Azema) and Camille (Ms. Jalou) are a pair of attractive sisters who turn out not to be the people they claim to be. Odile complains that her husband, Claude (Pierre Arditi), never takes charge of a situation, but is revealed to be a control-freak of the first order. Camille, a Parisian tour guide and university student, at first appears almost frighteningly self-possessed, then develops attacks of acute agoraphobia.

Camille has two avid suitors: Marc (Lambert Wilson), an arrogant, dishonest young real-estate agent who sells Odile an apartment that is not what it's cracked up to be, and Simon (Andre Dussollier), an older employee of Marc's who claims to make his living writing radio plays. Complicating matters is the sudden reappearance of Nicolas (Jean-Pierre Bacri), an old boyfriend of Odile's who has come to Paris to rent an apartment for his family. Nicolas, a raving hypochondriac who visits a succession of doctors, is unable to make up his mind on a place to live. He also becomes Simon's confidant.

SAME OLD SONG skips along merrily, as its characters intersect, chasing one another around Paris in a round-robin game of real estate salesmanship and romance. Their stories finally mesh at a lavish housewarming party at which collective neuroses and lies are exposed.

What does it all add up to? Not a whole lot. Yet by the end of the film you've become more than superficially acquainted with six recognizable and complicated individuals. How many movie musicals can make that claim?
- Stephen Holden, New York Times, September 26, 1998.

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