Louise Bourgon makes headways in The Girl From Monaco.A comedy thriller enhanced by location shooting
By Ed Rampell
Co-writer/director Anne Fontaine’s The Girl From Monaco is an entertaining, witty, genre bending story about Bertrand Beauvois (Fabrice Luchini), a high power, media savvy attorney defending a 70-year-old wealthy, but uncooperative witness an accused of murdering her younger lover, a member of the Russian mafia, in Monte Carlo. At first unbeknownst to the French lawyer, the defendant’s son hires a bodyguard named Christophe Abadi (Roschdy Zem, who co-starred in Indigenes, the great 2006 feature about the role North African soldiers played in Europe during WWII) to protect Bertrand from possible mob reprisals.
Enter into this combustible mix Audrey Varella (Louise Bourgoin in her star-turning, scene stealing feature debut), a delightfully ditzy, sexy young weather girl on a Monegasque (as Monaco’s natives are called) cable TV station. Back during Hollywood’s much vaunted Golden Age, central casting might have tapped Barbara Stanwyck or Katharine Hepburn to play an Audrey-type character in a screwball comedy like Preston Sturges’ 1941, The Lady Eve, or Howards Hawks’ 1938 laugh riot, Bringing Up Baby.
Audrey, who is half the suave French barrister’s age, quickly embarks on a torrid affair with Bertrand, who is twice her age but half as experienced. This complicates Bertrand’s increasingly complex relationship with his bodyguard, one of Audrey’s many former lovers. As the trial unfolds in a Monte Carlo courtroom and the courtship spirals out of control, the usually reserved attorney accustomed to being in complete control loses his cool.
What makes the girl from Monaco tick? Is Audrey simply a blithe, free spirit uninhibited in her sexuality? Is this beauty with an abdomen to die for a prostitute the Russian mob has hired in order to unnerve and distract the defense attorney, in order to blow his case? Or is Audrey merely a small time, small town girl awestruck by Bertrand’s fame and sophistication? Underneath her quirky dumb blonde persona is the scooter driving Monegasque really a shrewd social climber and gold-digger who yearns for life in the fast lane and has identified Bertrand as her ticket out of Monaco and into the big time of Parisian high society?
As the alleged crime of passion has taken place in the Principality of Monaco, the trial is set at one of the world’s smallest nations, probably best known for Princess Grace (Kelly), ritzy casinos and as a tax haven and hangout for rich and famous yachties and others. But what is it really like for Monegasques to grow up and live in one of the world’s most diminutive domains, flanked by France and Italy?
Auteur Anne Fontaine knows two or three things about life in a miniscule royal realm, as she hails from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which is surrounded by France, Germany and Belgium. One of the best things about The Girl From Monaco is that it was shot on location at the Mediterranean enclave, with exquisite cinematography by Patrick Blossier, the veteran French D.P. who has also lensed films such as Indigenes. Location shooting greatly enhances authenticity and realism; it’s extremely disappointing when movies such as, say, Billy Crystal’s 1995 clunker, Forget Paris, uses the brand name and allure of an actual locale to sell itself and then mainly takes place elsewhere. Or, in the case of films such as Suzi Yoonessi’ Dear Lemon Lima, which just premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and purports to be about indigenous Alaskan culture, but then turns out to be entirely shot at Washington, instead of in the 49th State. On the other hand The Girl From Monaco’s location shooting – including in an actual Monte Carlo courtroom – bestows the ring of truth upon this feature, enabling audiences to enter what is for many viewers a fabled far away fairy tale fiefdom where Princess Grace and Prince Rainier once preened for the press. (Adding to the realism is the amusing factoid that like her harebrained temptress, Bourgoin had actually been a television weatherwoman.)
The script by Fontaine and Benoit Graffin takes twists and turns as treacherous as the mountainous route where a speeding Grace Kelly met her tragic destiny. Like Fontaine’s 2003 film, Nathalie, which co-starred Fanny Ardant, Gerard Depardieu and Emmanuelle Beart as a kinky hooker, The Girl From Monaco comments on sexuality and contains a plot twist I didn’t see coming. Its mélange of film noir and screwball comedy makes Monaco more complex than most Hollywood flicks, with their typical one trick pony plots.
Audrey ultimately meets with the same fate most movie “bad girls” who enjoy sex ultimately do, and becomes a femme fatality. The Girl From Monaco can also be seen as a subtle commentary on the situation of displaced Arabs who have migrated to Europe.
Be that as it may, a star has been born with one of the best French imports since the Marquis de Lafayette, the Statue of Liberty, fine wines, camembert cheese and Brigitte Bardot. Louise Bourgoin is as bubbly as champagne, and that girl from Monaco is truly the woman who broke the swank at Monte Carlo.
