"Populaire" is finely crafted piece of junk that I could barely watch to the end; and watch it I did, but mostly in the same way that one is rubber-necking when passing a really bad car accident.
While the sets and performances manage to give us a kitschy feel of the 60s, everything else falls flat on its face: the story is dull, predictable and forced to the same degree that "Armageddon" was forced. Yes I am comparing this film to "Armageddon" - they both share an important "quality" (for lack of a better word): artificially created drama to keep the story moving. In Armageddon, every time the story slows down too much there is a meteor shower, while in "Populaire" boredom is interrupted by senseless arguments between main protagonists - meteor showers of different kinds.
Characters are ill-conceived, their motivations inexplicable, their actions everything but funny, and as a result, the film flows like a stale joke told by a three-year old who forgot the punch-line.
Someone said that this is a "feel-good" film. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even if we ignore the overly sexist world of this film in which men are gods and women are ordered around, we are still left with a sadistic boss who never manages to be likable, his little less psychotic secretary whose motivation is unclear to the very end and their family and friends who manage to stay boring despite suffering from severe mental problems.
We never get to believe that the main protagonist really wishes to compete in the speed-typing. As a matter of fact, the only reason she accepts the challenge is because it was a condition for her employment. Why would a boss employ an otherwise useless secretary just to have her compete in speed-typing? None of those things make any sense in the film, we are just supposed to accept that speed-typing was a world-class event in the 60s (it was not), that your average boss is crazy about your winning a meaningless competition, and that women were aching to work as secretaries, while male bosses were naturally psychotic, and that all that was fun somehow. To make it harder to suspend one's disbelief, the main protagonist is showed typing in an entirely impossible manner. Normally, actors and directors go out of their way to try and portray such detail with as much realism as possible, but here, the director has thrown caution to the wind, probably in an attempt to make the film less boring; however, it achieved the exact opposite.
Here and there it seemed that "Populaire" was meant to be a little quirky, the way "Delicatessen" or "Amelie" was... or maybe I just wished for some redemption for the time wasted watching it. As you may guess by now, that didn't pan either.
In the end what we are left with is an inexplicably dumb premise, with shallow characters, leading us on a wild-goose chase of forced emotions and relationships. All in all, one of the worst films of recent French cinema.
While the sets and performances manage to give us a kitschy feel of the 60s, everything else falls flat on its face: the story is dull, predictable and forced to the same degree that "Armageddon" was forced. Yes I am comparing this film to "Armageddon" - they both share an important "quality" (for lack of a better word): artificially created drama to keep the story moving. In Armageddon, every time the story slows down too much there is a meteor shower, while in "Populaire" boredom is interrupted by senseless arguments between main protagonists - meteor showers of different kinds.
Characters are ill-conceived, their motivations inexplicable, their actions everything but funny, and as a result, the film flows like a stale joke told by a three-year old who forgot the punch-line.
Someone said that this is a "feel-good" film. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even if we ignore the overly sexist world of this film in which men are gods and women are ordered around, we are still left with a sadistic boss who never manages to be likable, his little less psychotic secretary whose motivation is unclear to the very end and their family and friends who manage to stay boring despite suffering from severe mental problems.
We never get to believe that the main protagonist really wishes to compete in the speed-typing. As a matter of fact, the only reason she accepts the challenge is because it was a condition for her employment. Why would a boss employ an otherwise useless secretary just to have her compete in speed-typing? None of those things make any sense in the film, we are just supposed to accept that speed-typing was a world-class event in the 60s (it was not), that your average boss is crazy about your winning a meaningless competition, and that women were aching to work as secretaries, while male bosses were naturally psychotic, and that all that was fun somehow. To make it harder to suspend one's disbelief, the main protagonist is showed typing in an entirely impossible manner. Normally, actors and directors go out of their way to try and portray such detail with as much realism as possible, but here, the director has thrown caution to the wind, probably in an attempt to make the film less boring; however, it achieved the exact opposite.
Here and there it seemed that "Populaire" was meant to be a little quirky, the way "Delicatessen" or "Amelie" was... or maybe I just wished for some redemption for the time wasted watching it. As you may guess by now, that didn't pan either.
In the end what we are left with is an inexplicably dumb premise, with shallow characters, leading us on a wild-goose chase of forced emotions and relationships. All in all, one of the worst films of recent French cinema.