Fanny Ardant, Charles Berling
Per its title, this French film is about the uses and abuses of the well-timed cutting remark. Set in 1783 in the court of Louis XVI, it's an elegantly witty comedy featuring a wondrous performance by Ardant (the leading French actress who was wasted last year in Sabrina). Sexy as all get-out in towering powdered wigs, she portrays a calculating countess who both beds and abets the film's hero (Berling), an idealistic but impoverished young aristocrat, as he learns the treacherously slippery arts of social climbing and political intrigue at Versailles. Ardant creates a magnificently malicious character, a woman who, much like those malevolent creatures in 1988's Dangerous Liaison's, amuses herself by toying with the lives of others. And yet, near the end of the film, when her comeuppance comes, director Patrice Leconte gives her a long close-up in which, you would swear, she already hears the tumbrels rolling. (R)
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