Laure Calamy in Iris and the Men. Photo / supplied
Laure Calamy in Iris and the Men. Photo / supplied
If you’re going to use infidelity as a plot device, you have to earn it – think the political machinations of Lust, Caution, or the thriller of Fatal Attraction. Alas, one of many ways that Iris and the Men completely fails is that this French romcom is as inattentive toits script and character development as the protagonist’s husband is to his wife, resulting in a flaccid, chemistry-free film.
The now ubiquitous Laure Calamy (Antoinette in the Cévennes, Two Tickets to Greece) has been cast as a loose woman and sexpot ever since her full-frontal scene in Call My Agent. Here, she plays married dentist Iris Beaulieu, who loves her job, her life, and her husband (Vincent Elbaz), but not their lack of sex life.
This being France, Iris seems strangely shocked when a school mum recommends Iris take a lover by signing up to a dating app for middle-aged marrieds. Iris baulks for all of a split second, but before you can say “marriage counselling”, she’s sexting and lying to her husband, while she meets a series of strangers for prosaic conversation and nooky.
Worse still, aside from their four-year dry spell, there’s nothing ostensibly wrong with Iris’s handsome, devoted partner, and no effort made to justify her character’s cavalier mission.
Movies that spell out the dialogue via text messages can get pretty dull, and as Iris’s phone vibrates incessantly with missives from her many beaux (she even halts her dentistry work mid-drill to answer the phone), for a story that’s meant to focus on female lust and desire, it all feels surprisingly flat.
Iris and the Men could have been a celebration of mature womanhood, a romantic drama about mid-marriage renewal. Instead, boring and at times excruciating, it has no moral centre and nothing to say.
★½
Iris and the Men, directed by Caroline Vignal, is in cinemas now.
