4 stars (out of 5)
Director: Marc Fitoussi
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Lolita Chammah, Aure Atika, Chantal Banlier, Jurgen Delnaet, Luis Rego, Noemie Lvovsky
Rating: (M)
Copacabana (Rialto) sounds all lovely and tropical but most of the movie is set in Ostend during winter. For those of you who have never heard of Ostend, it is a ferry port in Belgium with a casino and not a lot else.
A slightly dodgy French company is trying its hand at selling time-share apartments on the waterfront and that is where our heroine Babou (Isabelle Huppert) comes in. She has led a flighty nomadic life moving from one madcap scheme to another. In the process she has burnt out her old friends and is starting to appear crazy rather than carefree to casual observers.
Her daughter once adored her but now is embarrassed and resentful. The final straw is when Esmeralda (Lolita Chammah) tells Babou she is getting married and she has told her future in-laws her mother has moved to Brazil and will not be at the wedding.
Hurt to the core, Babou decides to prove she can stick at a job but selling time-shares in Belgium is the only job that will take her. At first it seems a hopeless mismatch. Yet to everyone's surprise she shows a flair for it. In the end, the question is whether the job and the stability it offers will change Babou or whether she will humanise the job instead.
Best thing: It is hilarious to watch a sophisticated French woman who so strongly reminds you of a scrappy battler in the mould of Coronation Street's Janice Battersby.
Worst thing: The ending is so out of left field that at first I thought it was some sort of fantasy sequence.
See it with: Any teenage child who dares to think that you are embarrassing. It should buck their ideas up for a day or two.
- Christine Powley
