Everybody Loves Jeanne film review — French comedy let down by a half-cucumber

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Leisurely comedy Everybody Loves Jeanne is the sort of polished, intelligent confection that French cinema turns out in high quantity — elegantly conceived, sparkily acted, yet a little underbaked in a way that leaves you going, “Euhhh . . . c’est tout?” Debut filmmaker Céline Devaux is a live-action director and an animator, and here she merges the two forms in the story of a hapless heroine fleeing personal calamity.

Blanche Gardin plays Jeanne, riding high as the creator of a revolutionary eco-project until her brainchild sinks ignominiously in an incongruous passage of ocean-going slapstick. Crushed, she leaves France for Lisbon, where she grew up, and en route meets a bumptious ex-schoolmate, the presentable but motormouthed Jean (Laurent Lafitte, cheerfully going all out with affable buffoonishness).

Once in Lisbon — the city getting a bright but commendably untouristic sheen in Olivier Boonjing’s photography — Jeanne checks in with an unreliable ex (Nuno Lopes) and tries to shake off the ghost of her mother, who is guilt-tripping her from beyond the grave. She’s played, in the merest cameo of a cameo, by Marthe Keller, who was the Garbo-like diva in Billy Wilder’s 1978 Fedora.

The stylistic twist is that Jeanne is also haunted, and taunted, by her naysaying inner self — a cartoon creature oddly resembling a roughly sketched half-cucumber. This apparition has its moments, but introduces an inescapable archness to a film otherwise made of sharper stuff — a pity because, in the more abstract, decorative passages of Devaux’s animation, there’s real style at work.

Jeanne’s ace card is Gardin, an increasingly visible comic fixture in French cinema. She bears some facial resemblance, and has a not dissimilar comic rhythm, to British actor Jessica Hynes. Her flustered energy makes Jeanne more quizzically acerbic than the self-deprecating Bridget Jones-y flustered femme we think we’re in for. In its last stretch, alas, the film goes nowhere — although Lisbon in the quiet season is the nicest kind of nowhere to be.

★★★☆☆

On Mubi now