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TagsBY MIRIAM RINN
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
REVIEW
Shot by Francois Ozon in a glossy-magazine-layout style, "The Hideaway" follows a young French woman to a seaside villa after her rich lover dies of a heroin overdose.
Starring Isabelle Carre as Mousse, the film tracks the growing relationship between the pregnant woman, Mousse, and her lover's gay brother, Paul, who is played by dreamily handsome French singer Louis-Roman Choisy. The movie looks just as pretty as its stars, so it makes for a pleasant hour and a half, but the film's essential sentimentality restricts its emotional impact.
Mousse and her boyfriend Louis are young, thin, and good-looking, in love with each other and with drugs. The opening scenes are quite graphic in their depiction of the couple's drug use, but still make the actors look glamorous. It's not surprising when Louis doesn't come out of his stupor. Mousse, however, awakes from her coma in the hospital, and that's when she learns both that she is pregnant and that Louis is gone.
At Louis's funeral, his wealthy mother makes quite clear to Mousse that the family has no interest in an heir, and that they expect her to take care of the problem. She briefly meets Paul, who is more polite to her than anyone else, and the next time we see him, he's arriving at a house by the beach where Mousse is staying until her baby is born.His arrival seems contrived, as does a lot of what passes for plot in this film, but the two of them gradually develop a friendship and share their feelings about Louis and about his family. Because the characters are underdeveloped, the film sometimes seems like a beautifully set soap opera. Actress Carre was pregnant at the time of shooting, and she has the swelling face and body to prove it.
An emotional Mousse is jealous of Paul's flirtation with a young man from the village. She wants to go dancing with them, although her swollen body makes her a awkward sight. She runs into a woman on the beach, who wants to touch her belly and warns her that mothers are meant to suffer. It's pretty obvious Mousse doesn't want to be pregnant and that Paul is a good deal more mature. Actually, everything here is pretty obvious.
Francois Ozon is the director of "The Swimming Pool" and "8 Femmes," both of which feature either overtly or hidden gay characters. Louis's sex life is handled matter-of-factly, rather like the characters in this summer's "The Kids Are All Right." This film too touches on gay parenting, but in a much less nuanced way. More like a Lifetime movie-of-the-week way. If you like those, this is a passable French version.
