Country: France
Director: Agnès Jaoui
In 2000 Agnès Jaoui, who had been a film, television, and stage actress for more than fifteen years, ever since she was a teenager, directed her first film, The Taste of Others, which she also co-wrote with her husband Jean-Pierre Bacri and, along with Bacri, acted in. The Taste of Others established the essentials of Jaoui's style in all three movies she has written and directed. Jaoui treats plot as a process of discovery, using incident to illuminate character. Each of her films is constructed around a set of characters loosely connected by circumstances. They interact in a variety of shifting combinations in what might seem a casual, almost semi-improvised plot but is actually a skillfully engineered series of incidents that cumulatively reveal more about these people than we first saw or were shown. We may believe we immediately recognize these people, who seem straightforward types conforming to a set of self-defined behavioral patterns. But placed before the observing lens of Jaoui's camera, they gradually become real people with distinct identities and deeper personalities than at first seemed possible.