Truth counts in a relationship!

Title: Beautiful Lies

Year: 2010

Emilie (Audrey Tautou) runs a busy hairdressing salon, one day she receives an anonymous love letter, which she forwards on to her lonely mother Maddy (Nathalie Baye) thinking it will cheer her up. However, the sender is her maintenance-man Jean (Sami Bouajila), who sees Emilie screw up the letter and throw it away. Unbeknown to him, Emilie continues to write to her mother under the guise of an anonymous lover.

By the third letter it becomes known that Jean is in-fact a very intelligent linguist, and suddenly self concious, Emilie finds it almost impossible to be around him. Desperate to get him out of the salon for a while, she sends him to the mail. Sticking stamps on the letters he realises he's out of stamps with one letter left to post, Maddy's love letter. So he goes to post it by hand. Maddy, who is waiting with baited breath in her garden for the post snatches the letter, and follows Jean all the way back to the salon.

Emilie realises her 'good deed' has backfired, and so a line of well-meant lies are spun to avoid heartache. All the while Emilie has no idea that Jean is the sender of the original letter.

I won't spoil the ending, as I urge everyone to watch this film. In the first few scenes I was convinced it was going to be almost identical to Amelie, I mean you couldn't get two more similar names if you tried! And anyone who knows me, knows how much I love Amelie. Perhaps then it could be said I even wanted the two films to be similar. And yes, in a way they are, but Amelie and Emilie are two entirely different characters, and as usual Tautou lends herself perfectly to her role.

There were only two things that I picked up that drew me out of the action, one misspelled subtitle (sop instead of stop) and a silly shot where it looked like the camera man forgot to pan with Maddy's feet. Pedantic? Yes, undoubtedly, but that's what being on a film course does to you. It destroys the pleasure of watching a film and taking it at face value. Otherwise I felt completely rapt and immersed in the story, it had a carefree feel to it, like it was set in a blazing French summer in the 80's.

The title is very much the feel of the film, lots of lies between several very beautiful people. From the boyish femininity of Tautou (does that make any sense?) to the olive, dappled skin of Jean, and even Maddy possessed a certain mature beauty it is so easy to fall in love with this film. It has easily escalated to the top of my favourites list along with Amelie, Priceless and Angel-A. But then I've always been a fan of foreign films, and there's something to be said for the French language, it flows, a lot like Welsh, but if you'd have set this film in Cardiff and in Welsh it certainly wouldn't have the same feeling!

Another great thing about this film, is that it isn't soppy and it isn't completely far-fetched like a lot of love stories. A sign of a good film, to me at least, is the feeling of being a part of the story, an onlooker and forgetting that what you're watching has a bunch of equipment, a script and several people running around with coffee and props just yards away from the action on screen. This has as much to do with good acting as it does with a great story. It's only at the end, or during a desperate run to the bathroom that you remember you're sitting on a sofa, or in a dark room with lots of other people!

Fantastic film, a definite recommendation for any film lover. That is if you can put up with the subtitles! 10/10.