Full Moon in Paris Reviews

This fourth entry in Eric Rohmer's "Comedies and Proverbs" series begins with the proverb, "He who has two women loses his soul. He who has two houses loses his mind." The remarkably effervescent Pascale Ogier stars as the quintessential Rohmer woman, loved and admired by the men around her but desperately confused about the meaning of love. A trainee at an interior-design firm, Louise (Ogier) lives with her architect-tennis player lover, Remi (Karyo), in a plastic suburb outside Paris. He wants to marry and settle down, but Louise is still young and enjoys dancing at parties until dawn. Remi's pressure proves too much for Louise, and she takes an apartment in Paris in order "to experience loneliness." Ostensibly, she will spend her late party nights in Paris, sleep in her new apartment, and return to the suburbs the following afternoon. While in Paris, she spends a great deal of time with Octave (Luchini) a likable writer who's tortured by Louise's refusal to sleep with him. At one fateful party, Louise meets Bastien (Vadim, son of Roger Vadim and Catherine Deneuve) and takes him back to her Paris apartment. Soon, however, she regrets her mistake and reconsiders her affection for Remi. But several things have changed since back when. What Rohmer has done in this film--and has done so successfully in the past--is to take a brief, intelligent, comic look at a young Frenchwoman and her ideas of love. Ogier (the 24-year-old daughter of actress Bulle Ogier) delivers her lines with animation rarely captured on film, and she knows how to dance on screen as well. Her performance justly earned her a Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival, but her career was tragically cut short by a fatal heart attack.