Sexy-wife problems

In My Wife Is an Actress, real-life husband and wife Yvan Attal and Charlotte Gainsbourg play married couple Yvan and Charlotte. In the film, Charlotte is an actress—or, more accurately, a movie star, a sort of French Julia Roberts, recognized everywhere she goes, able to smile her way out of a traffic ticket and get into inaccessible restaurants simply by dropping her first name on the phone (though actually, it’s Yvan who drops her name to get a reservation).

This more or less follows real life: Charlotte Gainsbourg is indeed a French movie star who moves easily between work in France and England thanks to her flawless, unaccented English (her mother is British actress Jane Birkin). The movie departs from real life in the character of Yvan—in the film he’s a sportswriter, while Yvan Attal himself is an actor, writer and director. In fact, he wrote and directed My Wife Is an Actress, in addition to co-starring in it with his wife.

In the film, Charlotte is working on a film in England, playing opposite John (Terence Stamp), an aging but still attractive ladies’ man. Meanwhile, back in Paris, Yvan has a chance encounter with a former boyfriend of his sister. The man asks Yvan if it doesn’t bother him, seeing his wife naked and making love to another man on screen. Yvan tries to shrug the question off, but the man’s obnoxious persistence finally gets under his skin, to the point where he punches the guy out and spends much of the rest of the film shuttling back and forth between home and Charlotte’s London film set, making such an idiotic, jealous nuisance of himself that he all but drives Charlotte into bed with her diffidently lecherous leading man.

By using his wife’s and his own real names (troubling only to change his on-screen self from a fellow actor to a show-biz outsider), Attal sets us up to expect some kind of inside look at the predicament posed by the title and premise of his movie. On that basis, My Wife Is an Actress, blandly pleasant as it is, is a bit of a cheat.

The “money scene” in My Wife Is an Actress is one that will no doubt have audiences all across America giggling over their white wine and brie. Charlotte, sensitive to Yvan’s feelings, tries to get her director to reconsider a nude sex scene in the film. When he refuses, she boils over. “You just want to see me nude,” she snaps. “Why don’t you direct the scene nude yourself? Why shouldn’t I get an eyeful too?” She stalks off and we see inspiration dawn on the director’s face. Next day, when Charlotte returns to the set, everyone—the make-up woman, the cinematographer, all the grips and gaffers—are naked as jaybirds. (Director Attal, by the way, is more considerate of his star/wife than the director of the film-within-the-film; we see far more of the crew, male and female, than we do of Charlotte Gainsbourg.)

OK, it’s cute, and we do get, as Charlotte puts it, an eyeful. But didn’t the union shop stewards have anything to say about this? Besides, what does all this peep-show sniggering have to do with the honest questions Attal’s film raises—questions about the temptations of a glamorous workplace on one hand and irrational, insecure jealousy on the other?

Then there’s a subplot involving Yvan’s pregnant sister (Noemie Lvovsky) and her argument with her husband (Laurent Bateau) over whether to circumcise their son after he’s born (she’s Jewish; he’s not). No doubt there’s an engrossing and thoughtful movie to be made about that kind of conflict, but here—Who cares? This annoying subplot is worse than irrelevant—after all, the title of the movie is not My Sister’s Husband Isn’t Jewish.

What is Attal trying to do with these stray arrows fired over the house? Did he set out to make a movie about life with a famous and sexy star, then, when the chips were down, decide he wasn’t all that comfortable getting into it? Is he trying to beguile us away from the subject at hand, make us forget the movie he started to make? Well, OK, if that’s the way he wants to play it; but he brought it up in the first place.