Henri

"Les Papillons Blancs" is a French local organization for parents and friends of mentally disabled people.

It would be nice to write that this movie is chock-full of memorable scenes ,of delicate lines,of harrowing emotion and features two Oscar-caliber performances.

The subject is not that new:the odd pair of the younger and the older,the latter giving the former all he can and in return "the love he takes is equal to the love he makes" (see for that matter Penn's "miracle worker" ,Guy Green 's "patch of blue" ,Truffaut's "L'Enfant Sauvage",Randa Haine's "children of a lesser god" ,the list is endless).

A restaurant owner,a widower, hires a mentally disabled girl to help him .You can easily guess what will happen next.

The actors,some will say,are admirable: in fact ,she can hardly play and he sounds as he 's only half trying.She looks more like a hip neo- punk than like a mentally disabled girl.It might have made a good short but Yolande Moreau spreads her action thinly over 103 min ,which makes you yawn your head off.The lines of one scene involving three boozers consist of three words repeated in a drunken voice.

In short ,this is the kind of movie you would like to love ...Sadly...