Paul and Paulette Take a Bath review – misjudged romance takes wince-inducing wrong turn

Venice film festival
Jethro Massey’s New Wave-style feature debut about a couple who meet in Paris is quirky and well-acted but strikes some peculiar false notes with Nazi gags

Here’s a dreamy, quirky, well-acted but weirdly misjudged movie that I couldn’t make friends with. It is a romance in a New Wave style, with the British-French film-maker Jethro Massey making his feature debut as writer-director in the Venice critics’ week section. The Paul and Paulette of the title hang out in Paris, have sex and conversations in a way that perhaps conjures sense-memories of Jacques Rivette. Paul, played by Jérémie Galiana, is a young American in Paris, yearning to be a photographer, but forced to take a dull job in a real estate office; here he finds himself having an affair with his demanding female boss, nicknamed “Goebbels”, one of the film’s many baffling and tonally calamitous Nazi gags.

In the Place de la Concorde, formerly the Place de la Révolution, Paul is enraptured by the sight of Paulette (Marie Benati), an elegant, beautiful and stylish young French woman who is kneeling down in a trance, fervently imagining what it was like to be Marie Antoinette on the point of execution. He takes her picture, they get talking – amusingly, she asks him to cut her hair then and there, just like Marie Antoinette before the guillotine. They have a friendship with a sensual element: they talk about their current romances and Paulette tells him about her preoccupation with Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley (pretty cliched fan crushes these, surely, and sadly the film has nothing very new or interesting to say on the subjects). Finally, Paul and Paulette go and see her parents in Salzburg where her dad rather shrewdly says that the similarity of their names makes them sound like siblings – and perhaps in a way that is what they are.

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