Alistair Harkness reviews Who You Think I Am
Juliette Binoche is the best thing about French thriller Who You Think I Am, while Love. Wedding. Repeat does not make much of a case for the comeback of the romcom
Who You Think I Am (15)
✪✪✪
Love. Wedding. Repeat (15)
✪✪
Trolls World Tour (U)
✪✪
The Iron Mask (12A)
✪
Casting the incomparable Juliette Binoche as a 50-year-old divorcee who creates a fake online identity to get close to a younger man, the erotically charged French thriller Who You Think I Am isn’t quite up to the challenge of providing its star with a plot to match her nuanced performance. She plays Claire, a respected Parisian literature professor whose casual relationship with a 30-something architect called Ludo (Guillaume Gouix) comes to an abrupt end when it starts getting too emotionally involved for his liking. Spurning a not unreasonable request to spend a whole weekend together, he ghosts her on social media and gets his photographer friend Alex (François Civil) to intercept her calls – immature acts of casual cruelty that leave her feeling humiliated and confused. In need of some kind of explanation she decides to stalk Ludo online by setting up a fake Facebook profile and – in an effort to keep some distance – befriending Alex, whom she baits by posing as a 24-year-old fashion intern who likes his photography. It’s at this point that the film makes clear that everything has already spun out of control. Framed as a therapy session between Claire and her new psychiatrist (played by Nicole Garcia), the film starts flashing back-andforth to show how quickly Claire’s new online identity takes over her life as a virtual romance with the babyfaced Alex unexpectedly blossoms and the intensity of their connection reinvigorates her own sense of self worth. Thanks to Binoche, the film is better at exploring the psychological torment of Claire’s interior life than co-writer/director Safy Nebbou is at constructing a workable thriller to compliment the film’s themes. But if all the red herrings fail to satisfy, Binoche going full Catfish is enough to reel us in.
Love. Wedding. Repeat is the sort of romcom that used to come out every other week in the early 2000s but has since disappeared from the release schedules. This Netflix-produced throwback reminds us why. Though the title’s riff on the “Live Die Repeat” tagline of Tom Cruise thriller Edge of
Tomorrow may imply some sort of high-concept comedy involving lovestruck protagonists forced to relive their romantic entanglements until they end up with the right person (so Groundhog Day in other words), the film itself proves relatively uninterested in the multidimensional aspects of a plot built around the infinite romantic possibilities that a wedding party seating plan might throw up. Instead, it seems content to wallow in the not-very-interesting, not-very-high-stakes romantic dilemmas of Sam Claflin’s Jack, a bumbling Hugh Grant clone far too polite and English to tell his sister Hayley’s American war reporter friend Dina (Olivia Munn) how he really feels after first meeting her on a trip to Italy to visit his sibling. Cut to three years later and Jack and Dina are re-united at Hayley’s nuptials, both single, both clearly still into each other and both incapable of cutting to the chase as a series of interlopers, exes, secrets and sleeping pill mishaps conspire to keep them apart. Writer/director Dean Craig
(Death at a Funeral) spends so long running through the first disastrous version of the wedding that there’s only enough time to do one more version. So basically nothing works out. Then, for unexplained reasons, it does. Romcoms are supposed to predictable. But they’re not supposed to be this predictable.
The 2016 animation hit Trolls gets a colourful yet bland sequel in the form of Trolls World Tour, a musical melange about the value of diversity that autotunes any personality out of the songs its all-singing critters spend their days performing. The first of this year’s major studio films to debut on a premium streaming service instead of waiting for cinemas to re-open, its status as an industry test case notwithstanding, it’s not an especially auspicious release, serving up more Day-glo gaudiness as the first film’s pop-loving protagonists (once again voiced by Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake) discover a plot to eliminate all other styles of music bar hard rock. The episodic plot might, just might, be diverting enough for undiscerning wee ones, but there’s very little for the rest of the family to connect with here beyond half-hearted homilies about the need for many different voices to bring harmony to the world.
There was a time that the prospect of seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger face off against Jackie Chan in an action comedy would have been irresistible. Sadly that time was at some point between 1985 and
Trolls World Tour might be diverting enough for undiscerning wee ones, but there’s very little for the rest of the family
1995, which makes the chief selling point of the already woeful martial arts fantasy adventure The Iron
Mask even more redundant. The incomprehensibility of the plot is mitigated slightly by the realisation that this badly dubbed Russian/ Chinese co-production is actually a sequel to another film entitled The
Forbidden Kingdom. Like that film, this one also stars Jason Flemyng as an English cartographer and adventurer on a quest to do … well, who really knows? The film dumps a lot of impenetrable information over the opening credits and it’s pretty much downhill from this point on, with Chan popping up briefly as a mysterious prisoner and Schwarzennegger hamming it up as his Tower of London jailer. Yes, they end up fighting (or rather their stunt doubles do), but they’re on screen for all of ten minutes, most of which plays like a bad Christmas panto. ■
Who You Think I Am is available on Curzon Home Cinema; Love. Wedding. Repeat is on Netflix; Trolls World Tour and The Iron Mask are available to rent on streaming services, including Sky, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, itunes and Google Play