Le ventre de Juliette

The pregnant girl (and of course unmarried) has always been the permanent feature in the French cinema of the south of France.Blame it on Marcel Pagnol !Recently "La Ville est tranquille" was an updated version of Pagnol's classics of the thirties/forties.

"Le Ventre de Juliette " is more of the same .All that concerns Juliette and Matthias is endearing and the two actors J.Parmentier and S.Rideau are both convincing .

Unfortunately,the supporting actors are left to their own device .Their characters are caricatures and they overplay as hell.The mother looks like a Pedro Almodovar's heroine lost in "Whatever happened to Baby Jane?" (like in Aldrich's classic ,she was a star when she was a child and her blockbuster in Argentina was a version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears "which she watches again and again on her video)."Fafa ",Juliette's sister (and her bourgeois husband) is really a pain in the neck,and I'm polite.And the viewer who has not guessed who Juliette's father is after his second appearance is a moron. (no need for waiting the mother's "explanations" ) Both the beginning and the ending display the same pretension.