Look at Me

Agnès Jaoui (born October 19, 1964 in Antony, France) is a French screenwriter, film director, actress and singer of Tunisian Jewish descent. She frequently works in collaboration with her husband Jean-Pierre Bacri.

“I’m trying to beat Woody Allen,” said French filmmaker and actress Agnès Jaoui, whose work has often been compared to that of the New York laureate of manners and anxiety. Yet Jaoui wasn’t talking the quality or quantity of her movies. She was talking about therapy. So she is perhaps only partly joking when she says she hopes to outlast Allen for how long she can keep herself on the couch. Jaoui, 45, was in therapy for 12 years, stopped for a few years and has now been back at it for four. And she can tell that it’s helped with her filmmaking.

“Let It Rain” follows two hapless would-be documentarians as they try to make a film about successful women. Karim (popular French comedian Jamel Debbouze) is also a hotel receptionist, while Michel (Jean-Pierre Bacri, who cowrote the film) is a self-styled reporter of no apparent pedigree. Jaoui plays a big-city feminist writer returning to her provincial hometown in the South of France to enter politics. Her path intersects with that of the bumbling filmmakers, setting in motion a series of personal revelations.

For “Let It Rain,” Jaoui and Bacri, who write with two notepads and pencils, concocted a storyline that allowed them to touch on many sub-themes — feminism, immigration, sibling rivalry, class tensions, politics — under the umbrella of a larger conceit. —latimes.com