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MOVIE
REVIEW
'Merci Docteur Rey'
Lifelong
friendship is celebrated
in Andrew Litvack's giddy,
amused film.
By
Kevin Thomas , Times Staff
Writer
Sep 17 2004
"Merci Docteur Rey" offers an extremely
slender — yet a most beguiling — excuse for showcasing a clutch of
celebrated international actresses of a certain age. The plot is
unabashedly implausible, but it expresses first-time writer-director
Andrew Litvack's giddy, amused sense of life's absurdities. An elegant
Merchant Ivory production, it is too slight and perhaps too precious.
But it will be a witty pleasure for admirers of its grande dames:
Dianne Wiest, Jane Birkin and Bulle Ogier, with an appearance by
Vanessa Redgrave as herself.
The film is set in motion by Stanislas Merhar's Thomas, a slim,
gay, 23-year-old Parisian "looking for same" on the Internet. He is the
son of Elisabeth Beaumont (Wiest), an American opera star who has come
to Paris to appear in a production of "Turandot" directed by her old
friend Claude (Ogier), who is well-experienced in the ways of divas.
Thomas' Internet adventures lead to about as bizarre an encounter as is
imaginable with his father (Simon Callow), who supposedly had died in a
car accident before his son was born.
It's no wonder Thomas seeks out the services of Dr. Rey, a
psychiatrist. Alas, Rey's longtime patient Pénélope
(Birkin), a highly
unstable actress of waiflike appeal and an understanding heart, has
been pouring out her troubles to the decidedly nondirective therapist
only to discover Rey, who wears dark glasses, must have died early on
in their session. In a desperate state, Pénélope passes
herself off as
Rey to Thomas, the next patient, and is actually helpful. When,
inevitably, he discovers the ruse, he in turn calms
Pénélope by
assuring her that she is not responsible for the death of Rey, who had
a heart condition. It is the beginning of a friendship between two
lonely people.
The heart of the film is Pénélope's gradual recovery,
thanks to
Thomas' companionship. Birkin suggests that the flighty, birdlike
Pénélope is a gifted actress and a wonderfully candid
woman, for all
her eccentricities. Her unwillingness to work with actors "who make me
puke" has driven her from the stage, and she supports herself by
dubbing foreign films into French. (She has dubbed Vanessa Redgrave for
so long she is in danger of believing she is Redgrave.)
When Thomas takes Pénélope to meet his mother in her
dressing room, her
vulnerability in the face of the formidable Elisabeth is underlined by
her dress, which has the same print as the wall fabric; the effect upon
Pénélope is summed up in the old phrase "faded into the
woodwork."
Elisabeth turns out to be as comical as she is monstrous. Swathed
in caftans and scarves, she is outrageous but self-knowing, capable of
realizing that her son is "the only thing that makes me human." Wiest
is as amusing as she was as a Tallulah Bankhead-like star in Woody
Allen's "Bullets Over Broadway" — but a lot more malevolent. Ex-Mrs.
Mick Jagger Jerry Hall and Vernon Dobtcheff play a worldly couple who
visit Elisabeth in her dressing room after opening night. Redgrave also
drops in.
Litvack, who has been an assistant director to both James Ivory
and Ismail Merchant, takes a while to discover the proper rhythm for
his comedy. But he's clearly skilled with actors, and as "Merci Docteur
Rey" draws to a close he manages to pull together all the cockamamie
strands of his plot for a suitably delirious finish.
'Merci Docteur Rey'
MPAA rating: Unrated
Times guidelines: Adult themes,
situations,
language
Dianne Wiest...Elisabeth Beaumont
Jane Birkin...Pénélope
Stanislas Merhar...Thomas Beaumont
Bulle Ogier...Claude Sabrié
Karim Saleh...Hustler
A here!/Regent Releasing presentation of a
Merchant Ivory production in
association with Eat Your Soup productions. Writer-director Andrew
Litvack. Producers Rahila Bootwala, Nathalie Gastaldo. Cinematographer
Laurent Machuel. Editor Giles Gardner. Music Geoffrey Alexander.
Costumes Pierre-Yves Gayraud. Production designer Jacques Bufnoir. In
English and French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 31
minutes.
Exclusively at the Regent Showcase, 614 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323)
934-2944; and the Playhouse 7, 673 Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626)
844-6500.
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MERCI DOCTEUR REY
(Unrated).
Zut alors! A
contemporary French farce about narcissism and crazy love
that is as literate as it is loopy. Dianne Wiest is majestically
funny
as an American opera diva who is too self-absorbed to get that her
20-ish French son is gay and too distracted to know that he witnessed a
murder. This breezily theatrical fluffernutter from writer-director
Andrew Litvack also provides over-the-top opportunities for Jane
Birkin, who goes to town as an obsessive actress who dubs Vanessa
Redgrave movies into French, badly. La Redgrave blows in and out for a
good-sport cameo appearance. As the son, Stanislas Merhar evokes
memories of the Truffaut star Jean-Pierre Léaud in his callow
youth.
1:29 (sexual situations, drug use). In English and French, with
subtitles. Angelika, Manhattan. - JAN STUART
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/news/ny-etcaps3974303sep17,0,6438801.story
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 Cinéma
mardi
9
Décembre 2003
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A PLAYFUL, MADCAP INVESTIGATION WITH A PSYCHOANALYTIC RIFF
By
Isabel Régnier - Le Monde (December 3, 2003)
If it were a drink, it would be pink
champagne. An efficient remedy
against the grey of December. Amid slamming doors, madcap
situations
that keep getting reversed and the space cake (cake powdered with
marijuana) that travels from character to character, this unpretentious
little comedy, the first film by the American Andrew Litvack, is swept
along by the wind of Lubitsch. The perfume of Woody Allen is also
in
the air, both in the script with its psychoanalytic framework and in
the figure of Dianne Wiest who plays the mother, diva and lesbian
[sic], in Paris to perform in Turandot at the Opera Bastille.
Orchestrated
by an
aficionado of whimsical women (Bulle Ogier, Jane
Birkin, Vanessa Redgrave appear in the film), this joyous celebration
of cinema and its pleasures is also a nuanced tribute to European
cinema. The surprise appearance of Jerry Hall is the sparkling
red
cherry on the cake.
The film
is produced
by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, for whom
Andrew Litvack was at one point assistant. People speak English with
French accents, French with English accents, English with American
accents, and French with suburban accents. Perhaps this is all due to
the imperatives of the coproduction, but for once, this linguistic
hodgepodge is highly enjoyable.
Dr. Rey
is a
psychiatrist whose death, as soon as she appears on
screen, allows her patient Pénélope (Jane Birkin) to
sneak into her
place and to meet Thomas Beaumont (Stanislas Merhar), the Parisian son
of the diva, a homosexual still in the closet, who, that day, is in
dire need of a session of analysis. Since his mother has arrived
in
Paris, his Oedipal balance has been shaken. In the course of a few
hours, he discovers not only that his father wasn’t killed before he
was born as he had always thought, but that he had been murdered before
his eyes, without his knowing that it was his father, after they spoke
on a gay chat line.
Pénélope
admits she is not an analyst and offers to put him up at her
place. A chameleon who was persuaded for ages that she was Vanessa
Redgrave when in fact she simply dubbed in French versions of her
films, she lives amid film posters (Blow Up, Howard’s End) on which she
has pasted her own face over Ms. Redgrave’s.
With her
complicity,
Thomas plays detective and tries to uncover the
murderer in a universe of doubles, glitter, lies, and sexual ambiguity
which surround the father’s death. Without ever taking itself
seriously, this playful investigation which ends in a scene of
absolution in a maid’s room reveals that the murderer is no one other
than the double of the boy detective himself.
rating
of
• ARTICLE
PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 03.12.03 © Le Monde 2003
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September
2004
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Metro
Weekly Rating:  (4 out of
5) CRITIC'S PICK!
by
Randy Shulman
 WHEN
A MOVIE
boasts an executive producer by the name of Ishmail Merchant, you have
every right to believe you're in for a few hours of richly rewarding
quality entertainment. And this first-time film from writer-director
Andrew Litvack (whose association on Merchant-Ivory productions
includes an acting credit as an "American Officer Presenting a Dagger"
in Surviving Picasso), that belief remains firmly intact.
 This
irrepressibly French comedy stars mournful-faced Stanislas Merhar as a
young man struggling with his homosexuality as well as with an
overbearing opera diva mother (played to the histrionic hilt and beyond
by Dianne Wiest). When Thomas witnesses a murder, he goes on a search
for the killer, falling into an unlikely friendship with the supremely
neurotic Penelope (Jane Birkin), an actress who has dubbed so many
Vanessa Redgrave films, she's come to think of herself as a literal
extension of Redgrave. (Redgrave, in fact, makes an appearance in one
of the movie's juiciest scenes, and inadvertently insults the poor
woman by exclaiming "How could they give me such a tacky French
voice?")
The
slim Merhar gives a marvelous
performance,
reminiscent of Gerard Depardieu when he was less of a beached whale and
actually handsome. Merchant-Ivory favorite Simon Callow turns up in an
intriguing cameo and Birkin is a fumbling, nervous riot. But the movie
belongs to Wiest, who imbues her each and every scene with a steely
Diva-esque venom. "You don't mind if I call you bubblehead," she says
to Penelope, mistakenly thinking she's the older woman bedding her
23-year-old son. "I mean it kindly."
Merci
Docteur Rey offers
abundant joy in its weird,
loony narrative, which
is only
slightly marred by a certain predictability in the outcome. But as the
French might say, c'est la vie! |
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World
Movie Magazine
International Movie Studio
|
 MERCI
DOCTEUR REY!
Director :
Andrew
Litvack
Cast :
Dianne Wiest,
Jane
Birkin,
Bulle Ogier, Vanessa Redgrave
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Something of a new direction
for the
long-established team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, this
French-American comedy doesn’t have a corset in sight. Set in
contemporary Paris, American opera diva Elisabeth Beaumont struggles to
communicate with her 23-year-old son Thomas - mainly because Thomas is
a closet gay, who likes eating hash cakes and calling gay phone lines
to find dates.
As Elisabeth prepares for
her role as
Turandot, Thomas sets up a date where he is requested to hide in a
closet and simply watch a stranger have sex. Or at least that what he
thinks- but as the ‘date’ proceeds, Thomas finds himself witnessing a
murder – the murder of the man who set up the date by a young
mysterious Frenchman. True to all farces, the plot thickens when Thomas
discovers the man was in fact his father and sets out to find his
killer. Joining Thomas in his search is scatty voice-over artist for
Vanessa Redgrave Penelope, whom he befriends at psychiatrists Docteur
Rey’s who tries to help Thomas make-up with his over bearing mother.
It’s a delightfully
subtle,
brilliantly acted comedy with its roots firmly in ‘screwball’. Jane
Birkin, making a rare appearance on the silver screen, is a pleasure to
behold as Penelope and Wiest gives us an utterly hilarious diva who
along with her best friend Claude takes eating hash cakes, and
employing contract killers to new heights. Short and sweet, Merchant
cites this film as one of the new projects he is keen back, supporting
new directors and independent filmmaking. And squeezed in-between the
bodice rippers, its very welcome light relief in an action packed
climate.
Reviewed by Natasha Aitken
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