MUBI

I’ve never seen a bad French film. Until this. The script must have been 20 pages long because 130 minutes are shot in four locations with ten lines of dialogue. Is that a bad thing? It wouldn’t be if the cinematography was intriguing. Stella’s beauty is the only hope this film has of keeping patient viewers from demanding a refund and you get plenty of extreme close ups of every actor through the entire film. The actions of the characters are not believable, the dialogue is sparse and irrelevant that if you aren’t yelling at the screen or laughing at it, then you’re watching Stella’s strip tease. Whatever social commentary was attempted here is lost in poor writing and even poorer direction. For a film entitled Riviera, you will not see much of it through Stella’s nose hairs glowing in the sun. If you are a woman and want to see a film that portrays all men as rotten, boring, rich, abusive idiots, then knock yourself out. No pun intended.

Wow . . . this reminds me somehow of Hitchcock’s stated desire in the 60s to do a film that would respond to the aesthetics of the French New Wave and Antonioni.

That may be too high a praise for other viewers— but I was impressed by the film’s gauzy sensuality from the start; and since “Riviera” only very gradually reveals its psychological hand, I was quite sucked in. At moments I felt echoes of everything from Swimming Pool to Lost Highway to Frantic; by the very end it’s as if we’ve been dropped into a mash-up of Russ Meyer and Hitchcock’s Frenzy. A film of teases and punches, in more ways than one.

Stella and her mother Antoinette are women without money or power in a man’s world. Youthful Stella’s employers are men who need women to be “serious” about “looking good” because attractive and sexy women are profitable and necessary as go-go girls in a nightclub or as starlets in erotic films. Women without the good looks that sell in the entertainment world work “off stage” as hotel maids and in other service occupations where reliability and trustworthiness carry more weight than physical beauty. Women in this film are lonely and so are the men who abuse them morally or physically. Deep down, they may be all looking for the same love and intimacy but, locked into a world of shallow entertainment and consumerism with a tendency to generate shallow lives, their happiness is illusory at best. In this sense, the film works well as a social critique with the last scene driving the message home. It is, ultimately, a didactic film full of deliberate irony. Every character of any consequence in this film seems to make bad choices, the lack of conscience and self-reflection is alarming and the life altering or empowering choices are either amoral or immoral. The subtle and brutal ways in which this film directs the viewer’s attention to the two sides of a luxury resort where the veneer wears thin, collapsing boundaries, elevate this film as art rather than mere diversion.