Not My Type
Where: Cineplex Odeon
When: Tonight, 6:30
Rating: 3/5 stars
Here’s a movie for those who assume film festivals are dominated by dark, disturbing dramas, weird European films and depressing documentaries. Director Lucas Belvaux nicely subverts “opposites attract” romantic-comedy tropes with this surprisingly endearing, albeit at times cringeworthy, variation in which Clement (Loic Corbery), a Parisian philosophy professor, is exiled to a teaching post in a working-class town in northern France. Bored and miserable away from his beloved Paris, he becomes romantically involved with Jennifer (Emilie Dequenne), a beautiful and vivacious bleached-blond single mom hair stylist. He’s into Fyodor Dostoevsky and Immanuel Kant; she’s into Jennifer Aniston. You get the picture. What distinguishes this comedy-drama is how Belvaux defies our expectations while manipulatling obvious clichés, blindsiding us with some scenes that prove more heartbreaking than hilarious. Some witty dialogue, especially when mutual attraction forces the brooding intellectual and bubbly babe to venture out of their respective comfort zones, helps compensate for this European genre-bender’s more irksome plot developments. Despite such drawbacks, there’s an underlying humanity to this film that makes it irresistible.
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