Review: French Comedy 'Garcon Chiffon (My Best Part)' More Formless than Farcical

Nicolas Maury co-wrote, directed, and stars in the slightly shapeless – but still amusing – comedy "Garcon Chiffon (My Best Part)."

Maury plays Jérémie, an aspiring actor whose jealousy is so easily sparked – and so intense – that he alienates his hot boyfriend Albert (Arnaud Valois), who finally – after being followed to work at the veterinary clinic, confronted during an operation on a ferret, and interrogated about a semen-soaked T-short – throws Jérémie out of his flat, and out of his life.

Depressed, Jérémie makes plans to go to his father's memorial... hardly an uplifting occasion in any circumstances, but more fraught for the fact that his father (in a funk over being rejected by his own lover) committed suicide.

Jérémie's cheerful mother (Nathalie Baye) greets Jérémie warmly, calling him "my napkin" and pampering him as he painstakingly prepares for an audition of "Springtime Awakening." ("I'm still the right age to play a tormented, suicidal teen?" he wonders aloud.) But once Jérémie gets an eyeful of Mom's handyman Kévin (Théo Christine) he gets jealous all over again – doubly so, since Kévin, he marvels, is "beautiful all over."

The ingredients are in place for a fizzy farce, but the film never quite knows where it wants to land. The mood is bleak and sodden; Jérémie's actions veer between irritatingly immature and alarming. At one point, obsessing over his father's fate, he leaps from a bridge into a river – hardly a fatal plunge, but the moment is played for an absurdity that fails to materialize. Self-harm – even incompetent self-harm – is hard to sell as comedy, especially when rescue, in the form of a random band of nuns, is at hand. (One of the sisters even goes so far as to produce a decoction of holly – a curative, she insists, for Jérémie's pathological jealousy.)

The film is most convincing when it plays to the notion that Jérémie is play-acting. "You're not sick of suffering?" Albert asks him during one of his bouts of jealous misery; later on, his agent nails Jérémie's persona with the words, "If you'd been acting in the sixties you'd make movie after movie." These strands of deep psychological drama, while interesting, are never played as fully or stretched as taut as they need to be. The film is constantly distracted by less-than-funny hijinks and tired tropes (cue the senile, and sexually inappropriate, grandmother.)

Still, there's fun to be had (Isabelle Huppert makes a fleeting, but perfectly apt, cameo) and a poignant moment or two to be found – not to mention a sexy nighttime swim paired with a refreshingly genuine conversation between Jérémie and Kévin (although the latter is quick to assert that he's not into boys). Indeed, this might be the film's own "best part," though there's a too-neatly contrived resolution or three.

"Garcon Chiffon (My Best Part)" in select theaters Feb 25