The day Isabelle Huppert turns in a bad performance is the day Donald Trump builds a 'Welcome To The US' Hotel on the Mexican border and mans it himself 24/7 dispensing coffee and cake to one and all. But Huppert is defenceless against sloppy writing. Take this: In Souvenir she works in a factory simply adding topping to slabs of pate. It's semi- skilled and that's being kind. The feeling is she's been doing the job for several years yet the writers go out of their way to isolate her from her colleagues; she works on a bench by herself although there are others in the room; she lunches alone in the canteen although work colleagues are in groups of two or three at adjacent tables, when the bell goes at 5 p.m. she walks out alone, takes the bus and sits alone. She never seems to leave her apartment nor has any visitors. Enter a new employee, early twenties (although she doesn't look it in real life Huppert is 63), he thinks he knows her and soon claims she is an ex- singer who sang in the Eurovision Song Contest some 20 or 30 years ago and what's more the boy's father was in love with her back then. She denies this but he keeps pestering her, finally causing her to miss her bus home. No problem, he has a motor-bike. She invites him in to her well-appointed apartment and admits she IS Laura, the ex-singer. He says that he himself is a boxer but offers no details. Soon he asks if she will sing at a small concert at his club. She declines. End of story. Not quite. He disappears from the factory. She asks the supervisor who tells her the boy was only a temp. Cut to a gym. Huppert appears asking for the boy. Question: How has she, a loner, located the very gym at which he trains? You tell me cause the writers didn't feel it was important enough. She now agrees to perform on condition there's no PR. A TV crew turn up. She tells the boy to get lost. They wind up in bed, natch. Even at 63 you can count the number of straight men who would kick Huppert out of bed on the fingers of one thumb so the boy succumbs. But at no stage does Huppert say, hang about, I'm a good forty years older than you so on your bike. If you can overlook all this sloppiness chances are you'll enjoy this rom-com, after all it stars Huppert and better than that it doesn't get.
Review of Souvenir
