What we do see is slickly acted, but because the characters are so lightweight without being engagingly foolish, ''One Wild Moment'' is less an entertainment than an imposition on one's time. It's so easy for movies to show us everything and everybody that we tend to forget the amount of dramatic weight that can be carried by someone who is never seen. One of the minor triumphs of ''One Wild Moment'' is the way it acknowledges the importance of off-screen characters in films (in this case, Jacques's philandering wife).
''One Wild Moment'' unfortunately is the kind of farce that works best when it's trying least hard to be funny, as in a perfectly understandable, bitter confrontation between Pierre and his jealous daughter, Martine, and when Jacques is trying to persuade himself that his wife is telling him the truth when she says how bored she is at the Club Med. Fran,coise, in her girlish fashion, has told her father everything about her affair except the name of her lover. Instead, it becomes a quasicomic bedroom farce in which poor Pierre, having been seduced by Jacques's rapacious daughter, Fran,coise, agrees to help Jacques learn the identity of the bounder.
‘Drive My Car’: In this quiet Japanese masterpiece, a widower travels to Hiroshima to direct an experimental version of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”.‘Passing’: Set in the 1920s, the movie centers on two African American women, friends from childhood, who can and do present as white.‘Spencer’: Kristen Stewart stars as an anguished, rebellious Princess Diana in Pablo Larraín’s answer to “The Crown.”.‘Summer of Soul’: Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Mavis Staples and others shine in Questlove’s documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival.Scott and Manohla Dargis, selected their favorite movies of the year. There seems every possibility either that ''One Wild Moment'' will demonstrate the joys of carefree incest, French-style, or that it will turn into a kinky sort of sophisticated daughter-swapping party. The first morning they wake up in their rented villa, Fran,coise gets out of her bed and runs up to daddy's room, where she climbs into bed to be cuddled in a fashion not entirely innocent. In the car driving south, the two girls simply can't keep their hands off their respective dads. The friends take off for a summer holiday on the Cote d'Azur accompanied by their two nubile, extremely sexy teenage daughters, Fran,coise (Agnes Soral) and Martine (Christine Dejoux).įrom the very first sequence of the film, sex hangs over the foursome like a not-quite-fresh laughing gas. Berri's screenplay is about two middle-aged friends, Pierre (Jean-Pierre Marielle), a well-adjusted divorce without permanent attachments, and Jacques (Victor Lanoux), a fellow whose wife, whom he has happily fought with and loved for 20 years, is vacationing at a Club Med in Morocco. Featurelength films, even French comedies like this one, need to have some sort of point of view. ''ONE WILD MOMENT,'' a 1977 Claude Berri comedy that opens today at the Criterion and other theaters, gives the impression of having once been a short film that has been drawn out to feature length without anyone's having considered the consequences and obligations.