The original French title of “Happily Ever After” translates to “And They Got Married and Had Many Children.” That’s colloquially about the same as our fairy-tale cliché, “they lived happily ever after,” but the English title carries a sting that writer-director-star Yvan Attal doesn’t quite intend.
Everyone may be miserable in this funny, ribald, unexpectedly profound tale of married Parisian yuppies, but the joke and the tragedy is that they don’t have to be.
Stylish and only superficially superficial, “Happily Ever After” plunks us down with three male friends as they dance on the edge of their 40s.
Hotel manager Georges (Alain Chabat) is in full, nuclear midlife crisis, married to the sharp-tongued Nathalie (Emmanuelle Seigner) and cursed with a child he doesn’t much like. Vincent (Attal), a shaggy car salesman, adores his young son (Ruben Marx) but seems to have lost the pulse of his marriage to Gabrielle (Charlotte Gainsbourg), an attractively moody real estate saleswoman. The odd man out is Fred (Alain Cohen), Vincent’s co-worker and an easygoing bachelor who appears to have the phone number of every model in France.
This results in moments of fine comic cruelty when he has to juggle two cellphone conversations at lunch while Georges and Vincent look on in seething awe.
But Fred is unhappy too – he longs for lasting bliss – and the mysterious fickleness of men becomes the dominant subject of “Happily Ever After,” even as Gabrielle becomes the movie’s increasingly touching central figure.
Gabrielle finds herself considering adultery – as a daydream, as a thrill, as revenge for her husband’s distance – and Attal dramatizes her turmoil in scenes whose acuity and grace can leave you breathless. In one, she banters with a sexy older man looking at an apartment and has a sudden vision of her life as a divorced mother.
Where another filmmaker might condemn these people, Attal understands that we carry our own temptations and salvations inside ourselves.
“Happily Ever After” is a roundelay of muffled regret and explosive comic release; when we see blood on the walls, it’s the ketchup of a spontaneous food fight. The movie is at its best when it nails the separate lives of people who live together: the way a man can spy on his wife and child as if marveling that they’re his, or the manner in which a husband can spark a wife’s ennui into sudden fury.
There’s so much meat here that the director lets things go on too long, with one or two false peaks before an impishly ambiguous ending. He indulges in melodramatic contrivances; some of the insights are as shopworn as anything you’d find on “Oprah.” One can almost see the inevitable defanged Hollywood remake between the cracks.
At one point, Attal presents us with the image of two couples, one enduring a silent restaurant meal, the other just as silently renewing their affection. Which couple do you believe? the director asks us.
Which one do you want to be?
“Happily Ever After”
***
NOT RATED but contains scenes of sexuality and adult language|1 hour, 40 minutes|FRENCH MARITAL DRAMA|Written and directed by Yvan Attal; in French with subtitles; photography by Jennifer Auge and Remy Chevrin; starring Attal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alain Chabat, Alain Cohen, Emmanuelle Seigner, Anouk Aimee |Opens today at the Mayan Theatre.
