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Slap Her, She's French
*
Cinema Releases - October 18, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 12A. USA.
91 minutes. Directed by Melanie Mayron. Written by Lamar Damon, Robert Lee
King. Starring Jane McGregor, Piper Perabo, Trent Ford, Michael McKean, Julie
White, Brandon Smith, Jesse James, Nicki Lynn Aycox, Alexandra
Adi.
I wonder whether "Slap Her, She's French"
intends to sympathise with or satirise its main character. Actually,
wait -- I wondered that when the movie was playing, but now it's over, and
I'm long past caring. There is not one characterisation here that isn't
exaggerated, phoney or annoying. Now I'm wondering how the director managed
to give her actors orders while retaining straight face and clear
conscience.
The protagonist is a high-school student from
Texas named Starla Grady, played by Jane McGregor as a high-strung blonde
who whines and whines and whines to get what she wants. This girl gets offended
when her school paper uses the names of dolls in a negative context, screaming
in all sincerity that "Barbie is a role model!" She dates the quarterback
because she's the head cheerleader, and thinks it's the proper thing to do.
She is obsessed with Diet Coke, has a list of 60 steps she must climb to
be the presenter of "Good Morning America", and lovingly collects her beauty
contest trophies.
In the opening scenes of the movie, McGregor wins
the local 'Beef Pageant' by saying she's going to be kind enough to host
a foreign exchange student. What one thing has to do with another, I dunno.
Anyway, here the plot begins, with the entrance of a French student named
Genevieve LePlouff (Piper Perabo). This girl sheepishly crouches, dresses
in a schoolgirl outfit, constantly wears a beret and speaks in a French accent
so half-assed that you can guess the character's final twist from the moment
of introduction.
McGregor patronisingly thinks she's showing her
French protégé how to be a popular little miss, and Perabo
sucks up to her most grandly. Soon -- sooner than any of the movie's characters,
that is -- we realise that something funny is going on, and Perabo is not
really a meek little girl, but one intent on sabotaging McGregor's perfect
life, stealing her boyfriend, winning her competitions, et
cetera.
There are plenty of lame individual jokes to string
the running time out to feature length. One gag involves the way McGregor's
boyfriend is always eating so fast that his face is covered in food stains.
We also get a lot of eccentricity coming from McGregor's bitchy pair of best
friends, played by Nicki Lynn Aycox and Alexandra Adi as the kind of nitwits
whose first reaction on meeting a European is to shout, "Do you speak
American?"
The fundamental reason for "Slap Her, She's French"
being a bad movie is that it takes one character we don't like and another
we don't believe, and puts them into a battle of wills that is impossible
to care about and isn't very funny. Perabo is a pointless caricature, McGregor
is an irritating one, and no matter who the film is following, we keep waiting
for it to cut to one of the side characters and breathe some life into
itself.
Why did I go to see the picture? Maybe because
the trailer looked energetic, and because Piper Perabo usually makes my heart
go all a-flutter. Alas, there is only one scene in "Slap Her, She's French"
that justifies Perabo's presence, and that is the one in which she joins
the cheerleading squad. The camera lingers on Perabo wiggling her hips, licking
her lips, running hands all over her body, pressing thumb to tummy and doing
things with her eyes that made me freeze in amazement.
But damn, I won't let myself be manipulated. "The
New Guy" was a relentlessly unfunny comedy, but it refuses to escape from
the memory thanks to Eliza Dushku's dressing room scene. Now we have "Slap
Her, She's French", which, similarly, is 89 minutes of crap and 2 minutes
of sexiness. I'm taking a stand here, and refusing to be interested in such
bad movies for such simple pleasures. If someone makes a compilation tape,
I may just change my tune.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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