Bye Bye Blondie (再見，吾愛)

My closing film at the FFF, Bye Bye Blondie is a bit disappointing. I'm fortunate. The disappointment came last. It's a film adaptation of a French novel of the same name by director Virginie Despentes (who previously directed "Baise-moi"). It's about the renewal of a lesbian relation between a successful cultural TV personality in middle age Francés (Emmanuelle Béart) and her former teenage punkie lover Gloria (Béatrice Dalle).

The film opens with a pile of household objects being thrown out of a third floor window. We then see a furious Gloria emerging from screen left in black leather jacket and pants, and boots. The upper half of a male without any clothes appears on the window asking her to come back. But she marches in a puckered face to her favourite bar, a bar in a shed somewhere in the middle of nowhere for minor artists of non-conventional art. There she is consoled by her friends and told them that she had just broken up with her current boyfriend and that there's no way she would go back to him. Shortly thereafter, we see Francés arrive, unannounced, in a chauffeur driven Jaguar. They appear to have known each other for a long time. After a half cold, half indifferent reception, Gloria decides to follow her to Paris. Gloria is now married to a gay writer Claude (Pascal Greggory) in a marriage of convenience and living in a luxurious Paris apartment. Then there was a flash back to their respective teenage, where they met at a mental institution, Francés, for amnesia and Gloria for uncontrolled violence. From early on, Gloria (Soko) had been a punk from a working class family, with the usual teenage rebelliousness, sub-cultural values, songs, lingo, hairstyles, dress codes and rituals  alternating between anarchic violence and spontaneous sex a fair sample of which was shown to us on screen including a gang fight, a wild party at the suburbs and their arrest by the police at a bridge. Francés (Clara Ponsot) on the other hand, came from a well do do family with private tutors to prepare her for the "grands ecoles" or prep schools specializing in getting students to the big name universities in Paris. They had a good tender innocent time loving each other that summer after they got out from the mental institution/prison but in the end, Francés had to bow to middle class social and economic reality and follow his parents' advice and wrote a letter to Gloria which broke Gloria's punkie adolescent heart but which eventually led to her position as the host of a popular culture show on French national TV with very high audience rating.

The film then unfolds. We see how there were rumors that Francés would soon be replaced by a younger female upstart who decided to wear very short skirts in an effort to boost her own popularity rating, whom we see easing up to her from behind her seat in the dressing room, half admiring, half envious and half obsequious and how when Francés asked her producer of the show about such rumor when it got hotter and hotter, the producer assured her that nothing of the sort would happen and how when to her surprise the axe fell, she punched him in the corridors of the studio. We also see how Gloria started to use Frances' posh sitting room to build her artwork of metal sheets and wire and how she fought Claude's use of Japanese drum music to help him "get into the mood of writing" dressed in a Japanese kimono whilst being served by his adolescent gay playmate by turning up the volume of her own CD player's punkie rock songs and how in one of the parties by Francés and Claude, she got pissed with the hypocrisy of civilized conversation in affected Parisian accents of a female guest and started insulting the other guests. Her behavior raised some eyebrows as she stormed out of the party. On the way out, she hit one after another of those who tried to restrain her. Naturally, the police was called. She was arrested. Francés went there to bail her out. When she came out, she also came out of the "closet" of her hidden lesbianism: she kissed Gloria on the mouth in front of the cameras of the paperazzis. The film ends.

The film has great potentials for a bit more in depth explorations of how Gloria and Frances developed into the persons that we see or their struggle to adjust to their new life. But it merely scratches the surface. The film techniques and the use of the camera framing and music etc was unremarkable. In the end, the superficial lives of the two lesbian lovers was destroyed and so was the film's treatment of it. The only thing which saves the film from being a total failure are the scenes of the punkies enjoying themselves and the quality of acting of its actresses: they seem to fit the personalities of the characters to be portrayed so well. A brave but ultimately failed attempt by Virginie Despentes.