Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #93810 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-07-19
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 110 minutes

Customer Reviews

a question of skin
This movie is for anyone who is sensitive to smell, touch, language, or who wants to be. Typically French in all the right ways, this comedic melodrama is so much more than plot. In fact, it's about sensitivities. It's about intersections, collisions of time and place and perceptions, observations. It's about mothers and daughters and grandmothers, and it's about all the other mothers that come into our lives, sometimes only to leave again. And of course, it's about love. What French film isn't?

Too many mattresses, tables and chairs; music and sleep mingled with the lack of them both; a smoking oven; empty and almost empty refrigerators; pregnancies feared and longed for; an old diary, a writer's notebook, eavesdropping; flowers in vases and so many repeated phrases. Whimsical and terribly serious, this film unreels like a classic. I watch it again and again and always take something new away from it.

This is where I fell in love with Sylvie Testud... as Charlotte. Charlotte chain smokes and takes a cerebral and celibate approach to her work writing erotic stories. Charlotte listens to her mother. She makes no apologies for her domestic inadequacies, even as her house fills with strangers over and over again. She turns each interaction into something larger, more relevant to the story she seeks as life's chaos adds its spice... like thyme on roasted chicken.

Simple
The French do have a knack for being able to make movies around seemingly trivial and day-to-day topics. This movie's storyline spins around a daughter (Sylvie Testud) and her mother's constant movement from one house to another. They are in a constant and unending cycle of selling their house & entertaining potential buyers. Their interaction with potential buyers is interesting (though not the highlight of the movie). The movie chugs along at its own pace letting the viewer soak in the slow story.
At times, the movie gets boring and at other times it induces creative thoughts and at times reflection. I wonder how this movie might feel on a big screen. In my opinion, this movie is made for small screen viewing (lazy Saturday afternoon fare). You can excuse yourself numerous times for tea, coffee or beer and still catch the storyline as if it were a slowly moving train.