Mon père, ce héros.

This French movie was re-made only two years later by Disney (so this is as close as I've ever come to reviewing a Disney movie). The story is about a divorced French father (Gerard Depardieu) who takes his resentful adolescent daughter (Marie Gillain) on a beach vacation. It starts out as kind of a farce when his daughter tells everyone at the resort that her father is actually her much older lover, but it turns much more sentimental and sweet when she meets a boy close to her own age, and her father is forced to realize that she's growing up and he has to let her go. There's no doubt this movie is less saccharine and cloying than the American Disney version, but it is also much more innocent and "family-friendly" than most French "coming-of-age-on-the-beach" movies like Eric Rohmers "Pauline on the Breach" or Catherine Breillat's "Fillete 36". This movie is actually completely appropriate for teenagers--except that American teenagers, of course, cannot be called on to read subtitles, thus the unnecessary Hollywood re-make.

Gerard Depardieu (who also starred in the re-make) is quite good in the role of the father. It's quite easy to accept Depardieu as a kind of Gallic Robert Deniro, but his status as a sex symbol is perhaps a little more baffling. Here though at least he keeps his clothes on (thank god) and he doesn't really romance any improbably attractive women. Improbably attractive, however, is a good description of the actress, Marie Gillain, who plays the daughter. She was probably sixteen or seventeen here, but could have easily passed for twenty, and with the revealing swimwear she models, she would probably have a pack of slobbering guys following her everywhere even in France (or perhaps especially in France). It's a little hard therefore to buy her as a shy, awkward fourteen-year-old working up to her first kiss. She gives a game performance though, and whereas her equivalent in the American version, Katherine Heigl, would go onto "Gray's Anatomy" and many horrible Hollywood romantic comedies, each more horrible than the last, Gillain has had a more low-profile, but much more interesting career.

This would make a good companion piece either to other fairly "family-friendly" movies with Depardieu like "Cyrano", or to other Gallic teen flicks fit for a high school French class like "La Boum". Not my usual cup of tea, given the Disney connection, but I'd still recommend it.