In Agnès Jaoui’s lovely Look at Me, the world is seemingly against 20-year-old Lolita Cassard (Marilou Berry), a would-be singer whose unrequited love for a friend blinds her to the affections of a young man whom she helps outside of a club after he collapses on the sidewalk. Tired of people using her to get close to her father, Etienne (Jean-Pierre Bacri), the self-conscious Lolita understandably mistrusts everyone. The film’s circle of characters includes the girl’s adorable Arab paramour, Sébastien (Keine Bouhiza), her young stepmother Karine (Virginie Desarnauts), and her indecisive singing coach, Sylvia (Jaoui), who becomes increasingly tolerant of Lolita after she learns the identity of her father.
Like her earlier The Taste of Others, Jaoui co-wrote this amusing confection with Bacri. Together, they make art out of the physics of everyday dialogue, a talent for which they were rewarded the screenplay prize at Cannes ’04. Some characters, namely Sylvia’s author husband and a long-time friend of Etienne’s who the author seemingly saved from a life of terrorism, scarcely register, but the writers have an uncanny way of coding emotional subtext in the film’s symphony of words and music. A student of Patrice Chéreau and Éric Rohmer, Joui sees the humanity in everyone. If the themes of body consciousness and misdirected desire are lightweight compared to what Denys Arcand grapples with throughout The Barbarian Invasions, Joui’s worldview is infinitely less cynical and abrasive.
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