Cuisine chinoise (1999)

User Rating:

5.9/10   

Director:

Frédérique Feder

Genre:

Short

Plot:

Patricia is married to Pascal. She misses her freedom and, while reading Sun Tzu's The Art of War, finds...

Cast

Irène Jacob	...	Patricia
Yvan Le Bolloc'h	...	Pascal
Martine Lapertot	...	Madame Lupin
Gérard Selles	...	Jean-Claude
Sophie Menges	...	Reneé
Phillippe Launay	...	M. Lupin

Country:

France

Language:

French

Color:

Color

A young woman indecisively parked in a relationship where nothing is terribly wrong, but she no longer feels any magic.

This slight 15 minute short explores the thoughts and daily actions of a late 20's or maybe 30ish woman who no longer feels passion or much attraction for her attractive boyfriend of about the same age (maybe a few years older). It's set mostly in their Paris apartment. There doesn't seem to be anything really wrong with him or their year old relationship, except that she doesn't feel the magic anymore. He does get (understandably) annoyed by her increasing remoteness, and her attempts, as she puts it, to "de-seduce" him -- though he doesn't seem to recognize it as that.

The short description in the excite.com TV grid website that this is a move about a woman trying to break off an "obsessive" relationship seems thoroughly wrong to me. (I saw it on the Sundance Channel.)

Although she's attractive, he's better looking than her (certainly by comparison to the respective "fields" for each sex) with a strong, masculine personality, and is attentive, without fawning on her. He is the one who wants her to stop always going off and obsessively reading her book (Sun Tsu, "The Art of War"), and come watch a show with him. We don't know his work, but he's got an Apple computer he uses at home. He is obviously chosen as someone a lot of women would love to be with, although we see no flirting by either of them with anyone else. She is indecisive about just breaking it off -- she doesn't dislike him, she fears loneliness, and he does occasionally break through her increasingly thick shell with well done love making she can't or doesn't resist. She's not miserable in the relationship. It's better than being with no one. There's not reason she shouldn't be able to find someone else (or he either).

She wants to move -- and so he finds them a new place -- together. She remains ambivalent. She's comfortable, including sexually. But not passionate. It's certainly possible the entire problem is in her head. But of course that's where we live our lives.

It's interesting as a short characterization of a place I think many young women inhabit in relationships while they are waiting to find, or be found by, someone else. Where the chemistry, for whatever reason mysterious or not, is simply hotter.