Kritiken

An amusing watch, this has a freshness and naturalism rarely found in the typically over-styled French romcom genre – one can imagine an American remake with Amy Schumer or, were this the early noughties, Katherine Heigl.

[Triet's] dialogue... is sharp, witty and never quite goes where you expect it to... [The film] includes a good deal of interesting, amusing gender role reversal, not just in Victoria’s relationship with Sam, or the way in which she deals with sex, but throughout.

The basic ingredients of Triet's film would do for any number of glossy Hollywood timewasters... yet from the off, it's marked and distinguished by a strain of wildness... which gives In Bed with Victoria radically different rhythms to the stock slick romcom.

[In Bed with Victoria] is far from a conventional mainstream romantic comedy... [Triet provides] insights into the complexities of modern women juggling professional and private lives while dealing with intense internal crises.

[In Bed with Victoria] bears all the hallmarks of classic American comedy and demonstrates a subtle mastery of the narrative potential offered by borderline and chaotic situations.

“In Bed with Victoria” is buoyed by irresistible performances on the part of the titular lead (Virginie Efira) and inevitable romantic interest Sam (Vincent Lacoste). It is their turns that imbue the film with its energy, even if its generic formula and social milieu is at times too familiar.

Despite tons of energy and even more outlandishness... there’s a lot about Victoria that plays like weirdness for weirdness’s sake, while the conclusion follows a path taken by many rom-coms before.

If anything, what Triet has done is demonstrate that people are allowed to be complicated — and at times contradictory. And the tidy Hollywood ending betrays the fact that Victoria’s problems have less to do with sorting out who’s in her bed than what’s in her head.

Efira is in nearly every scene playing harried and overwhelmed with decent comic timing. But it’s difficult to care about her compound difficulties even when she turns out to be far less ditzy in the courtroom than she is in her private life... The actors are very good but the material they’re working with falls short of making Victoria’s personal chaos consistently compelling.