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Take notice, girls: you don’t need men

While these movies may sound like tired cliches, they are refreshingly complex

Look at Me (PG 13)

The name Lolita connotes a beguiling beauty irresistible to older men, but the central character of this French film, Lolita Cassard (Marilou Barry), is a chubby aspiring opera singer who goes unnoticed by her famous father, author Etienne Cassard (Jean-Pierre Bacri). At twenty, Lolita spends much of her time desperately seeking her father’s approval.

Look at Me explores self-perception, hypocrisy and celebrity. Set mostly in Paris, feelings are articulated in emphatic French and the film conveys a sense of a highly literate society. Admiring fans pursue Etienne, but he is unable to lavish this kind of attention on anyone else.

He ignores his daughter’s singing efforts, but he also ignores his wife, Karin, despite her physical beauty. Though Lolita’s awkwardness embarrasses Etienne, he also seems embarrassed when his pretty wife articulates any opinion.

Lolita must believe in herself because no one else does. At times she has the annoying tendency to be both self-deprecating and unrealistic in her expectations of herself. Director Agnes Jaoui chooses to bolster Lolita’s self-esteem by introducing Sébastien, a young man devoted to Lolita.

This plot turn leaves the viewer wondering when a girl with body image problems might ever be depicted as solving them herself. The love story is a classic one. Boy meets girl, girl and boy fall in love, yet insecurities of girl prevent her from believing that boy can possibly love her. However, this story line becomes most entrancing and a scene in the night on a bicycle becomes a memorable depiction of the urgent pursuit of love.

Choral music accompanies much of Look at Me and is an ideal soundtrack because of the risk and reward associated with singing. In the end, Look at Me examines for whom we are singing.

—reviewed by Rebecca Taylor

My Summer of Love (R)

The title makes this film sound like a trashy novel with Fabio on the cover, but it’s actually an incredibly powerful and well-done movie that debuts two talented young actresses.

The two main characters in My Summer of Love represent two distinctly different worlds. Mona (Natalie Press) lives above her mother’s pub and has no education, no job and no plan for procuring either. Tamsin (Emily Blunt) is a bright, sophisticated socialite whose parents haven’t paid enough attention to her. She has just been kicked out of boarding school when she literally rides into Mona’s life and the two fall into a friendship that is both incredibly unlikely and entirely natural.

Mona escapes the banality and frustration of her life by entering Tamsin’s posh world. Despite their obvious differences, the two girls find common ground in their senses of humor and form an intense symbiotic relationship. It is obvious that they need each other, or a least think they do, and the result is an emotionally volatile connection.

It is a movie in which nothing really happens except a relationship, and in this case that is quite enough. The girls’ relationship moves from sisterly to sexual and on to something more intense and consuming, but the movie is not about a lesbian romance. The movie is not concerned with social commentary, nor is it a simple coming-of-age tale of a bored girl trapped in a dreary Yorkshire town.

It is about the desire for someone to notice and to understand, and the intensity that can result from such a searing need.

—reviewed by Caitlin Carmody

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