Beautiful Lies (2010)

Emilie is the part owner of a bustling hair salon in a small port town in France, amongst her employees is the over qualified handy man Jean, who is secretly in love with her, but too afraid to admit that love directly. Instead he writes a passionate and heartfelt anonymous love letter that he sends to her in the mail.

Upon its receipt, Emilie promptly bins the letter and were it not for her sad and depressed Mother Maddy, the story may have ended there. However Maddy has been in a bad place since her sculptor husband left her for a younger woman, it has been 4 years and yet she still clings to the hope that her husband may return. Emilie knows different however and has been delaying the news that her Father’s new lady friend is indeed pregnant and he wishes to divorce Maddy in order to marry her.

So, in an attempt to perk her mother up, Emilie retrieves the letter from the bin, copies it and sends it to her Mother, what results is a sometimes humorous though more times painful cringe fest as a small white lie sets to destroy all those in its path.

Those of you who have seen Salvadori’s Priceless will be somewhat familiar with the types of events that transpire in this film, but for a romantic French comedy I was expecting much more. This felt more like an American rom com missing only the toilet humor inherent in such movies.

None of the characters are likeable, either coming off as annoying, vapid or simply uninteresting with the situations they find themselves in equally as annoying or distracting.

With the limited selection of Foreign films we get on our shores, it is always a shame to be disappointed, but sadly that is how I felt after this film.