I don't really understand the approach that some people bring to commenting on a given film. I'm speaking specifically of what appears to be what I can only describe as resentment that a given actor - Duke Wayne is a prime example - appears to play himself in every film when that aberration is the very thing that has propelled him to stardom. Surely if it's widely known that, to take another example, Fred Astaire specialized in musical films that called upon him to sing and dance and YOU don't LIKE musical films then why pay money to see them and then moan because the leading player does what he is best known for. Jean-Pierre Bacri who is as fine an actor as he is a writer, which is saying a lot, has developed a persona of morose, misanthropic grouch and polished it until it gleams but most people who regularly watch French films know this and choose to celebrate the ease with which he assumes this persona rather than finding fault with it. In Kennedy et Moi he displays yet another facet of this character playing as he does a writer who is fresh out of ideas and is in addition undergoing a mid-life crisis. Sam Karman, who appeared in the original stage production of Cuisine et Dependences which was co-written by Bacri and his long-term partner Agnes Jaoui, and subsequently played alongside Bacri and Jaoui once more in the film version, has written and directed a fine film that explores this all-too common subject. Bacri is excellent as always and Karman himself offers fine support as does another fine actress-turned-director Nicole Garcia as Bacri's wife. This is a modest film but highly enjoyable.
Review of Kennedy et moi
