📽 DELICACY [David- & Stéphane Foenkinos, 2011] - Film review by Mandibil

What is interesting about films aimed primarily at the female audience is to see to what degree there are underlying, "subconscious" themes, aimed at excusing potentially bad or immoral female behavior, while at the same time conditioning men to accept them. In this context it is even more interesting that it is based on a novel written by a man and furthermore produced in cooperation with his brother Stéphane Foenkinos, who apparently is a director.

Nathalie (Audrey Tautou) loses her charming and handsome young fiance in a car accident while he is jogging. Luckily they do not yet have children, despite pressure from her family to produce some. She mourns the loss for a while but then returns to her job as a lawyer. Her smarmy boss sees a new opening and tries to hit on her but she soon rejects him by feigning probable inability to handle an emotional relationship following her fiances death.

Acting completely irrational, Nathalie kisses a random male colleague Markus (François Damiens) intensely when he enters her office. But when he comes back the next day to ask why, she plays stupid and tells him she did not notice and she was probably thinking of something else. Markus is confused, which is exactly what Nathalie is going after. It is a pretend of interest cloaked in rejection. Basically it is a shit-test technique. If he stays despite her ridiculous behavior, he is a betamale and she has power over him. Then she knows he can be manipulated.

Markus tries to charm her in his clumsy and geeky way. She tries to ignore him but his honesty and almost deliberate self effacing style gets her more and more curious. The start dating and talk quite well and she starts to get somewhat attracted. But then one evening he tells her that he feels he is not worthy of her and that she sort of ridiculous him by going out with him. He leaves her standing on a bridge. She is dumb-founded, because this action was not what she expected. He actually has some self esteem and pride (alfa male traits) and this raises her respect and interest in him.

Markus looks are not really hunky, to say the least, so between the lines we know that Nathalie is arguing with herself whether she can "love" an "ugly" man, even if he has all other "virtues" in place. The hypergamic genes of Nathalie and her colleagues and friends have a natural tendency to shun ugliness and go for hunky-ness. But we also realize that Nathalie has risen above her own primal sexual instincts and have become able to see a real person instead of a sexual object. She sees the beauty of honesty and reality through Markus and falls in love with it all, including Markus.

There is a great release in the transition from the stupid, immature dating rituals of the start of the relation, to the deep, virtuous insights of the last part. This is actually a beta-male fantasy. That a "hot", attractive and intelligent woman could end up starting a relationship with a man many levels below even her equal level of "hypergamy". I see it as a desperate cry from men towards women, to start to see the real person in men, despite their hypergamy.

This is a simple and gentle little movie. Damiens does a very impressive job with the Markus character. His ability to show a vast array of internal emotions in Markus by little gestures or certain postures or movements is admirable. Tautou is good despite her less nuanced character. But when she really needs to extend true emotion, she does it very believably.

The ending is a bit weak for my taste, it sorts of just fizzles out. There are some stylized cinematography now and then that is nice, but not really creative and i guess not to destroy the generally gentle expression. But they seem to be applied as a sort of arbitrary entertainment rather than an artistic tool to enhance the expression of the film at large. Overall this is a recommendable film for Damiens peculiar and meticulous portrait of Markus.. and the overall message. The excusing of behaviors of women is not very strong, except that an accident has been chosen instead of a divorce, which would have been thousands of times more likely.

Rating: 7/10