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Pacific Palisades (1990) review

Posted : 8 years, 9 months ago on 13 June 2015 02:15

Completely inconsequential piffle about a bored girl in Paris who decides to fly to America, but the business she thought that had a job waiting for her ceased to exist, so housesitting 2 dogs at a lavish residence she becomes a bored girl in Los Angeles. Sophie Marceau is of course the star of the show and her summer attire reveals plenty of skin with her legs getting special recognition, but her character Bernadette does not carry the same level of appeal as in her other movies. She's fickle and irresponsible and shows a lack of respect for other people's property, willfully destroying an answering machine and screen door of her considerate hosts. She encounters a guy from Ontario who looks a lot like Joaquin Phoenix and he proceeds to take her on cluelessly terrible dates while she gives him the cold shoulder (but can't resist one scrum under the covers). They share nothing in common, so why are we supposed to care about where their unromance goes? Fittingly the ending is just as flat.

I didn't mention that they share a language in common because, in case you didn't know, everyone in LA from the truck drivers to greasy spoon waitresses speaks perfect French. That whole Hispanic influence is just a load of liberal propaganda. For the intended French audience part of the filmmaker's purpose was to illustrate, often with broad unflattering strokes, the difference of the American lifestyle. A few jabs hit the mark like when Bernardette walks her suburban neighborhood without encountering a soul, while others are completely off base in their ignorance like her encounter with two joggers who discourage her from smoking. Hence one of his biggest points about her alienation gets rendered completely impotent when there isn't even a language barrier, instead she just comes off as gripey and intolerant, qualities I'm sure he wasn't intending to appoint to his main character.


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