You’ll have to read subtitles but it’s worth squinting for. Starring the too-beautiful Audrey Tautou, Beautiful Lies is haphazard, bizarre, dry and even Oedipal!
A handy man who works in a hairdresser’s falls deeply in love with his boss Emilie, played by Tautou. You can’t help but think this happens to a lot of handymen who are bleeding radiators while Audrey Tautou is in the room – it’s a wonder central heating ever works in her company. Ruthless with her scissors, hot-headed, hard on the outside but soft on the inside, Emilie is completely oblivious to Jean’s affections and longing misguided looks over folded towels. Deciding to take the plunge, he writes her an anonymous love letter, thinking she’ll put the two and two together. Beautifully written, with tens of drafts, sentences re-worked and sentiments in poetry, Emilie takes one look at the letter and tosses it in the bin, situated centimetres from Jean, kneeling anxiously by the radiator. Callously disregarded, Jean stops bleeding radiators and starts tending to his bleeding heart.
Meanwhile, Emilie spends time visiting her mother, lonely and still suffering from the heartbreak of her divorce from Emilie’s father, now married to a woman of Emilie’s age. In a hare-brained attempt to give her mother some confidence, Emilie retrieves the crumpled letter and forwards it to her mother’s address. Director Pierre Salvadori’s plan is revealed! As Emilie’s mother starts returning the affections, figures out it is Jean who has written the letter, but still thinks it was meant for her, comedy and cringe skip happily together as the love triangle gets in a tangle.
i-D online blushed our way through an interview with the French superstar with lots of oohs, ahh’s and oo lala’s!
Beautiful Lies is in UK cinemas today.
