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BY PETER KEOUGH
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"Listen to Me" might be a better title for Agnès Jaoui’s charming gabfest of ruthless egos. Almost all the characters want attention, and those who keep quiet are the only ones who deserve it. Her name alone might make Lolita (Marilou Berry), the large-sized ugly-duckling daughter of famed writer Étienne (Jean-Pierre Bacri), the neediest of the bunch. Late for the opening of her dad’s new play, she’s stopped at the door by security and pouts with the other excluded groundlings on the street. One of them, Sébastien (Keine Bouhiza), has passed out, and in a rare compassionate gesture, Lolita covers him with her coat. Thus begins a relationship that she at first disdains and later dismisses as just another attempt by a writer wanna-be to gain access to her celebrated father. No one, it seems, is immune from this self-interest, not even Lolita’s ostensibly sympathetic singing teacher, Sylvia (Jaoui), who gloms on to the great man to further her husband’s career. As for Étienne, he’s munificent, neurotic, self-centered, and a total asshole who walks out of his daughter’s singing recital in what proves to be the film’s most moving moment. Jaoui orchestrates this bitch fest with subtlety and irony (note that Lolita doesn’t hit the Häagen-Dazs every time she has a setback, as would be the case in the Hollywood version), but the petulance gets tiring. I wish the director had paid more attention to the less squeaky wheels, like the humble and gifted Sébastien, and Étienne’s narcoleptic hanger-on Vincent (Grégoire Oestermann), whose brief snippet of back story sounds like a fascinating movie in itself. In French with English subtitles. At the Avon and Jane Pickens. (110 minutes)
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