This latest production by woman director and co-scriptor (with Vincent Juillet) Melissa Drigeard in which she takes a half sympathetic and half satiric look at how some junior feminine office ladies in their late 20s or early 30s living alone in the 20th Arrondissement of Paris look for and fail to find the love of their lives. Being commercial cinema, its approach is of course neither sociological nor anthropological but takes the more palatable form of a "romantic comedy".
It's principal character is Julie (Alexandra Lamy), who frequents the "self-help" section of a local bookstore and devours everything she could find on "self-improvement", looking for that elusive "magic formula" which she hopes will transform her life into one full of positive energy, purpose and meaningful relationship and as she is a woman, "love". For such purpose she even devoutly attends all the courses run by a Viktor Bells ( Michel Vuillermoz) and beams radiant smiles at every one she meets upon arrival at her office each morning including Louise, her colleague who is having an "affaire" with her boss semi-openly and would not lose even 2 minutes before working hours officially begin to "make it" with him behind his boss's office door and on his leather swing chair. They're part of a threesome who all share the same fate: their relationship with men are all less than satisfactory: Louise's boss claims to be married and promises to quit his wife but somehow never does: Rose's boyfriend of 3 years is a bore.
When the film starts, Julie receives a note through a courier from her "ex boyfriend" that she would always stay in his heart as a sweet "memory". This causes another heartbreak and a depression. But that's not her first. She decides to change her life by reading up and seriously takes the kind of "advice" she gets from the gurus dispensing their "wisdom" in attractive and ever so easy to read formats: she continues to think positively and even changes completely the decor of her apartment, believing fervently that a change of the environment will effect a change of her mood, her attitude and even her life.
When Louise found out that his boss was not even married, hell broke lose: they went into his apartment, cut all his ties, pierced the woofers of his speakers, broke all his wine glasses, smashed his ceiling lamp, and cut his cushions and let the feathers fly and then went to a bar disco to celebrate. It's there that Julie encounters another good looking guy Charles (Julien Bosselier) who shows some interest in her but on that very first chance meeting, she asks him with unbelievable "tactlessness" how many affairs he previously had and why they didn't work out. Needless to say, that was the end of another possible amorous encounter.
Julie's next adventure was with an osteopath whom she met at the local bar-disco and first rejected and then accepted his invitation to go out with him but found that the kinds of things which takes his fancy, the sights of Paris, meant absolutely nothing to her and told him point blank of that fact. When he felt himself rejected, he flew into a rampage and destroyed everything in sight within his beautiful middle class home.
Then it was the turn of another good looking guy who passed himself off under the name of "Ange" ("angel") in the "self-improvement" section of the bookshop she frequents and by accident bumped into him again at a Zen workshop by her guru in which all kinds of alternative herbal medicine cures and heath products were touted as having magical properties and in no time struck up a relationship with him until one day when she returns early from a business trip and finds him organizing a group sex orgy in her apartment. When the film ends, we find a crowd gathering outside the vitrine of the bookshop looking in at Julie making it on the a ground floor desk in the middle of the bookshop with its owner Marc (Jean-Paul Rouve) who always gave her some special attention although she never seemed to have "noticed" it previously. Will she finally find the kind of happiness that she is looking for? Heaven knows.
There are some moments in the film in which Melissa Drigeard seems to want to say something about the pretentious phoneyness of New Age cant by having Rose openly denouncing it with some real intensity as "shit" and blurted out that it's all right to feel the pain in human relationship and not just act as if it were something unreal, to be worked off and made to disappear with all sorts of "techniques". But this theme was never really developed. But seeing the film is a good way to have some light comedy. I like particularly the scene in which one of Marc's girl friends was jumping on him on a sofa demanding him to give it to her there and then and in the agony of the moment, he grabbed the nearest thick book within the reach of his hand and brought it down mercilessly on her head, an act which finally made her slump on the floor beside his sofa. When he looked at the title of a self-help book, he remarked that it really seemed to be of a little help!
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