La Fidelité Review

A young French couple have doubts, but get married anyway. Then the doubts resurface, and she goes off to test herself. When she returns, the husband cannot believe that she has not been unfaithful, and loops of distrust keep forming.

by Colin Kennedy |
Published on
Release Date:

01 Dec 2000

Running Time:

166 minutes

Certificate:

15

Original Title:

La Fidelité

Mon dieu! If The League Of Gentleman made a three-hour sketch slandering modern French movies, it might just scale the preposterous peaks mounted by this yawn-a-thon. With pretensions to be both a meditation on the nature of fidelity and a high Shakespearean tragedy of internecine feuding, this is in fact a tortuous sequence of strangers having wordless sex for no apparent reason, then flagellating themselves silly with unspecified guilt.

Marceau is an attractive lead, but after two hours of watching her flouncy photographer vacillate between duty and desire you will want to punch her in the face. Astonishingly, this corpulent carcass was selected as lead ambassador for a selection of French films touring the UK. Quelle erreur! It’s enough to put you off French films forever.

Remember that Monty Python sketch with Terry Jones walking around in a junk yard, smoking a cigarette and rambling pretentious bollocks while wearing a striped t-shirt, beret and sunglasses? That was better.
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