AUDREY TAUTOU MOVIES
Venus Beauty Institute
Madam Nadine manages with pride the "Vénus beauté" Salon which offers relaxation, massage and make-up services. The owner and her three beauticians: Samantha, Marianne and Angèle are pros. Contrary to her friend Marianne, who still dreams of the big day, Angèle no longer believes in love. Marie, the youngest of the three employees, discovers love in the hands of a sixty year-old former pilot, who risks everything...
Pretty Devils
Sisters Léa and Aurélie, 19 and 13, live in Paris with their mom. They miss their dad, who drowned. Their mom has a new man, Vincent, a cop. The girls are angry, stealing wallets from gymnasium locker rooms and running a con on men Aurélie invites to an empty gym (Léa bursts in, law book in hand, quoting the penal code on statutory rape). Aurélie befriends a runaway, Anne-Sophie, 19, who tells them her dad, who's abandoned her, lives across the street; Léa reluctantly takes her in and designs a series of vengeful pranks that disrupt his life. Things get worse when a victim of their scam has a heart attack. All roads lead back to their dad's death. Can healing happen?
Happenstance
Audrey Tautou (star of Amélie) shimmers like a born movie star in Happenstance. A woman on the morning train tells Tautou that the full moon will lead her to her soulmate; from there, Happenstance follows a marvelous interlocking series of events, in which little things (like whether or not a young museum guard eats a piece of chocolate) affect bigger ones (like whether or not an adulterous husband will tell his wife the truth). The numerous characters intersect with each other's lives, creating a web of coincidences that finally catches Tautou like a hapless fly. This could have been cloying and forced, but the writing and directing are so deft and subtle that the coincidences of Happenstance feel natural and compelling. A sweet and hopeful movie, with excellent performance all around, but Tautou's wide-open eyes leap out of her every scene, hypnotic and charming.
Amelie
Amélie (Audrey Tautou) is a shy waitress in a Montmartre café. After returning a long-lost childhood treasure to a former occupant of her apartment, and seeing the effect it has on him, she decides to set out on a mission to make others happy and in the meantime pursues a quirky guy who collects discarded photo booth pictures.
God is Great, and I'm Not
The impossibly adorable Audrey Tautou (Amelie, Dirty Pretty Things) stars in this remarkably vivid portrait of a relationship. Michelle (Tautou), a fashion model, sets off on a spiritual quest in the hope of finding emotional balance. What she finds is a veterinarian named Francois (Edouard Baer, Alias Betty), whose ambivalence about being Jewish leads Michelle to study the faith and consider conversion. The plot sounds heavy, but God Is Great (And I'm Not) is actually a light, fluid movie that's as alert to the thousand tiny ways in which men and women miscommunicate and defeat their best intentions. Michelle's spiritual yearnings are questionable, yet Tautou captures her hunger for something more and makes it real, even if it may also be shallow. The movie stutters, slips sideways and back, and circles around--and in the end, says more about modern romance than a dozen Hollywood romantic comedies.
He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not
Angelique (Audrey Tautou), a young student, is in love with a married doctor. We see her attempts to make him leave his pregnant wife, but he does not appear for meetings or finally the booked journey to Florence. Then the movie is turned back to the beginning, and the view changes: We are now following the view of the doctor instead of Angeliques. And things look quite different now...
Dirty Pretty Things
Okwe, a kind-hearted Nigerian doctor, and Senay (Audrey Tautou), a Turkish chambermaid, work at the same West London hotel. The hotel is run by Senor Sneaky and is the sort of place where dirty business like drug dealing and prostitution takes place. However, when Okwe finds a human heart in one of the toilets, he uncovers something far more sinister than just a common crime.
Not on the Lips
A frothy 1925 operetta, performed by a cast that includes Sabine Azema and Audrey Tautou, might not sound precisely like the great director Alain Resnais's glass of champagne. But Not on the Lips (Pas sur la bouche) is in a line of Resnais films that uses false sets and stylized acting for its effect. This musical farce follows a wife (Azema) trying to keep her husband (Pierre Arditi) from learning that she was actually married once before--to an American who is about to become hubby's business partner. Awkward. Audrey Tautou, in a distinctly supporting role, navigates the trickery of flirtation as she tries to attract lounge lizardy Jalil Lespert. Azema and Arditi are smooth as glass, but the standout here is Lambert Wilson (the French dude of the Matrix saga) as the tall, cigar-smoking American businessman, who disdains the unhygenic dangers of kissing on the lips. Wilson's delivery of English phrases and his American-accented French is spot-on--you can hear the joke even if you don't speak Freench.
A Very Long Engagement
Both epic and intimate, A Very Long Engagement reunites Audrey Tautou and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the star and director of the hugely popular Amelie. A young woman named Mathilde (Tautou)separated from her lover by World War I refuses to believe he's been killed and launches an investigation into his fate--an investigation that spins in all directions, creating dozens of miniature stories (including that of an Italian prostitute avenging the death of her own lover by elaborate means) that shift to and fro in time. The dazzling curlicues of narrative put brutality and tenderness back to back, shifting between crushing inevitabilities and miraculous rescues with deft storytelling skill and the lush visual style of the director of Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. Through it all, Tautou--fierce and luminous--anchors the movie effortlessly. She's among the most emotionally engaging actresses in cinema, with the kind of expressive beauty that transcends language. A gorgeous, far-reaching film; the huge cast also includes Jodie Foster, Gaspard Ulliel, and Dominique Pinon.
Russian Dolls
Xavier is now thirty. No longer a student, he is not yet a well-balanced, fullfiiled adult either. His career is unsatisfying : far from being the renowned novelist he aimed to be he must be content with little jobs such as reporter or ghost writer. His greatest "achievement" in "literature" is his collaboration to the script of a corny TV soap ! His sentimental life is not much better, rhythmed by one night stands and unfinished romances. It looks as if when he seduces a woman beautiful outside and inside such as Kassia or Wendy (Tautou) he can't keep them. Will he ever bring his life into focus?