Romantics Anonymous


Comedy. Starring Isabelle Carre and Benoit Poelvoorde. Directed by Jean-Pierre Ameris. In French with English subtitles. (Not rated. 80 minutes.)


The first time I saw this French comedy, I laughed so hard I was in pain. At times, "Romantics Anonymous" is sidesplitting, as funny as movies ever get. Yet it's also rather touching, in its portrait of two people - complete nervous wrecks - trying to overcome their shyness and make contact.

The American title, "Romantics Anonymous," is a little misleading, in that the movie is not about romantics so much as it's about people so fearful and self-conscious that they are flummoxed by every social encounter.

Social inhibition is something everyone knows, even those who routinely blast through it, so the movie connects with audiences in a familiar place. At the same time, the story takes social discomfort to hysterical extremes. Everything is difficult for these people, including answering the telephone.

The film is set in the appealing, almost fantasy-like world of chocolate making. Isabelle Carre plays Angelique, a chocolate chef of genius, too shy to promote her work. She applies for a job making chocolate and is mistakenly hired as a sales rep, a job she's not suited for. She is someone who has to prepare notes in advance just to be able to carry on a casual conversation.

Meanwhile, her boss, Jean-Rene (Benoit Poelvoorde), who owns the chocolate company, is if anything an even bigger basket case. Poelvoorde has some of the movie's funniest moments, in that he plays someone who is at all times both miserably uncomfortable and struggling to maintain a facade of blitheness and authority. That contrast - between how he's trying to present himself and how he is, in fact, going over - is an endless source of humor.

This is never more the case than in the dinner scene - Jean-Rene and Angelique's first date - which is at least as funny as anything you'll see this year.

"Romantics Anonymous" audiences may be surprised to learn that Carre and Poelvoorde are not generally known as comic actors. Carre has a lilting quality that lends itself to comedy, but she is mainly a powerhouse, specializing in women in the midst of great emotional or psychological disturbance. The last time she and Poelvoorde made a movie together ("In His Hands"), he played a serial killer, and she played a twisted woman who falls in love with him.

Likewise, the director of "Romantics Anonymous," Jean-Pierre Ameris, who also co-wrote the screenplay, usually makes heavy dramas, such as "C'est la vie," set in a real-life hospice.

How all this translates in "Romantics Anonymous" is that Carre and Poelvoorde ground their characters' shyness in psychological truth. They get their laughs, every last one of them, but they don't play strictly for laughs, but with the faint suggestion of real pain underneath. That makes it possible to take their plight seriously even as we're laughing and to leave the theater feeling that we've seen something not just funny, but lovely.
