Dir: Marc Fitoussi | Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Kiberlain and Anne Marivin | comedy Drama France, 115’
There is an irresistible irony at the heart of All About Corinne: Isabelle Huppert, the doyenne of French arthouse cinema, plays a woman condemned to remain unseen.
In Marc Fitoussi’s comedy of ambition, vanity and professional invisibility, Huppert exchanges the commanding presence that has made her a star for Corinne Maclou, an indefatigable film extra whose greatest ambition is to be noticed. The joke is immediately apparent, but the film finds something more substantial beneath it: a sharp-eyed examination of an industry in which a fortunate few occupy the limelight while countless others hover at the margins.
Corinne spends her working life moving from one film set to another, hoping that somebody will recognise her potential and offer her a proper role. Armed with an inexhaustible supply of CVs and a determination bordering on the socially inappropriate, she pursues her dream with an enthusiasm entirely disproportionate to the opportunities available to her. Her fortunes appear to change when she encounters Sandrine Kiberlain, playing a version of herself: an established actress whose celebrity brings its own assortment of privileges, insecurities and blind spots.
Corinne sees in their developing relationship a possible route into the profession’s inner circle. Whether this constitutes friendship, opportunism or a peculiarly unequal form of mutual dependence becomes one of the film’s central questions.
The narrative is built around the comedy of bad manners and bruised egos. Rather than inventing an entirely fictional cinematic universe, Fitoussi blurs the distinction between reality and performance, allowing Kiberlain and other familiar actors to play exaggerated versions of themselves. The result has something of the insider’s mischief of Call My Agent!, but with a more pointed interest in the class divisions governing the profession.
Corinne’s predicament is not simply that she lacks recognition. She inhabits a hierarchy in which proximity to fame can be mistaken for a share of its rewards. She can stand beside a star, appear in the background of a scene or spend hours waiting on set, yet remain essentially invisible. Meanwhile, those who have achieved celebrity enjoy privileges their less fortunate colleagues can scarcely imagine. Fitoussi exposes this inequality with a lightness of touch that makes the satire more effective than a straightforward denunciation would have been.
Visually, the film exploits the contrast between the apparent glamour of the finished product and the less glamorous machinery of its production. Film sets, corridors and backstage spaces become the territory through which Corinne navigates her perpetual search for an opening. Her distinctive hairstyle and slightly eccentric wardrobe suggest a woman determined to manufacture a screen presence even when nobody has offered her a screen to occupy.
Is it amusing? Yes, although its humour is more caustic than uproarious. The comedy comes from Corinne’s extraordinary persistence, her inability to recognise when she has outstayed her welcome, and the discomfort of watching her push herself into the orbit of people who would prefer not to notice her. There is something both funny and faintly painful about her refusal to accept the limits imposed upon her.
Huppert understands precisely how to exploit this contradiction. She plays Corinne without the comforting self-awareness that might make the character conventionally sympathetic. Her determination can be exasperating, her self-belief absurd and her attempts at self-promotion embarrassing. Yet Huppert never reduces her to a comic fool. Beneath the awkwardness lies a recognisable human need: the desire to be seen, valued and to believe that one’s life might still take a different direction.
Kiberlain provides an excellent counterpoint. Playing upon her own public persona, she captures the casual privilege of a successful actress who may be perfectly pleasant while remaining largely oblivious to the difficulties of those beneath her in the professional pecking order. Their encounters have a delicious ambiguity: neither woman is entirely innocent, and neither is quite as independent of the other as she would like to believe.
There is, however, a difficulty the film never entirely resolves. Huppert is so unmistakably Huppert that it can be hard to accept her as an unsuccessful actress condemned to the background. Her intelligence, authority and sheer screen presence continually threaten to overwhelm the character’s supposed anonymity. This is both the central comic conceit and the film’s most persistent limitation. The satire also occasionally loses momentum as its central relationship circles around familiar questions of envy, dependence and recognition.
Nevertheless, All About Collette is an intelligent, frequently amusing comedy with a sharper edge than its breezy surface initially suggests. Its greatest achievement is to make the pursuit of fame look simultaneously ridiculous and poignant. Fitoussi’s affection for cinema is evident, but so is his willingness to expose its vanity, cruelties and entrenched divisions. More slyly amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, the film is at its best when its comedy reveals the sadness beneath the dream of being discovered.
NOW IN FRENCH and BELGIAN cinemas