Ni Vue ni Connue

The premise for a new film starring Isabelle Huppert, Ni Vue ni Connue (All About Corinne), is certainly promising. Why not cast the celebrated multi-award-winning actress in the role of an unknown extra (figurante in French), Corinne Maclou, and surround her with actors playing themselves – Sandrine Kiberlain, Anne Marivin, Ana Girardot, Vincent Dedienne, Thomas Jolly, Diane Kruger, Emmanuelle Bercot – with whom Corinne tries desperately to ingratiate herself in order to gain the chance of playing a speaking role?

If the formula for this movie seems familiar, it’s because its writer and director, Marc Fitoussi, cowrote and directed episodes from Series 3 and 4 of the smash-hit Netflix series Dix Pour Cent (Call My Agent), including the glorious episode featuring Huppert and another one with Kiberlain, and wanted to recreate some of its magic in this screen version.

Huppert, who herself must have rubbed shoulders with thousands of real-life extras hoping for just a sprinkling of the actress’s talent and success, plays her role as a kind of idiot savant. She is frumpy, awkward and dogged in her pursuit of the favor and friendship of Kiberlain in particular, who somewhat improbably begins to rely on Corinne’s advice after being inspired by her performance of a theatrical role, which she watches on a video link found on the CV that Corinne is constantly handing out to any actor who will take it.

Corinne had previously discovered that Kiberlain was playing the same role to great acclaim in a major Parisian theater and confronted the actress, who only afterward begins to use Corinne as a kind of acting coach, while promising to find her film roles that never quite materialize. Instead, she employs her as a dresser on set in Morocco, which only serves to demean Corinne further.

French critics seem generally to have been won over by the film, so why did it decidedly fail to charm me? First, while the inequality between extras seeking work and the stars traveling and living in luxury is successfully satirized, surely the most effective response to this unfair situation would have been to have given the role of a struggling extra not to Huppert but to an actual struggling extra. If Huppert’s star status is what draws in the crowds, she could easily have played herself and handed an unknown actor a life-changing opportunity.

Second, Huppert’s performance as an extra, while convincing and even occasionally moving on its own terms, is decidedly unflattering, bordering on condescending, to all those who do not share the opportunities she has enjoyed.

Third, unlike Call My Agent, in which the famous actors send up their star status in an uproarious way, the portrayal of the actors playing themselves in Ni Vue ni Connue misses the same sense of fun. The lack of meaningful help offered to Corinne by Kiberlain playing herself left a somewhat bitter taste in the mouth.

If you want to see a far more successful movie inspired by Call My Agent, go see the recently released Call My Agent the Movie on Netflix, written not by Fitoussi but by the show’s original writer, Fanny Herrero, with all the familiar characters returning and with its two breakout stars, Camille Cottin and Laure Calamy, on wonderful form.

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