Happily Ever After (2004)

Truly the worst movie I've ever seen in a theater

To me, this movie is perfection.

So much average

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

This is one of the more interesting and clever French films of recent times. Yes, it dips into cliché and stereotype territory occasionally, but the dialogue and complex relationships between the actors keep it fresh and enjoyable to the end. Though intended to be just about guys of a certain age and their romantic problems (see Attal's interview in the DVD bonus features), I would say the women steal the show in many ways. Charlotte Gainsbourg is truly wonderful and delivers a very emotional, multi-dimensional performance. Ditto for the beautiful Angie David, playing Attal's mistress. But watch out for Emmanuelle Seigner! She is hilarious as Alain Chabat's ball-busting wife, and deserves to have her screen-time doubled at least. (Indeed, though this film is a sensitive treatment of the serious subject of the pain of infidelity, there are several moments where one loses one's breath laughing.) Attal adds interesting, unusual elements, such as the periodic food/water fights with his wife and Johnny Depp's superb cameos, and overall does a commendable job with the script.Analytic sidebar: Reading between the lines, it appears that this film is intended to convey the message that having a mistress is okay, and the alternate ending (DVD bonus features again) reveals Attal cagily continuing his affair to the end (though this ending did not test well - tellingly - and was changed for the final release). Attal reveals in the bonus interview that he purposely portrayed his wife as a wonderful, understanding, gem of a woman and yet wanted to show that it was still also okay for his character to have a mistress. This adds an extra splash of perverse pathos to the film - Attal writing a script about how it's okay for him to have a mistress, and then casting his own wife in the role of his on-screen wife. Ouch. A bit self-serving in retrospect (though, to be fair, never creeping into Woody Allen territory). Stiff upper lip, Charlotte.In sum, a fine film, innovative in pleasant ways, and full of great performances.

There are other reviews on this site that discuss this movie's finer plot themes, etc. However I write this my first review because I felt so compelled by the look of this movie. This movie will truly delight eyes and ears and for sure worth its rental fee. There is one particular scene, a sort of transitional fade from flowering colors to the character, that is particularly beautiful. I went back to it again and again when the movie was over. The film is kind of an impressionist painting in which the characters come to life upon. A great and modern musical score adds to the film's vibrant look. Add a nice bottle of wine and dinner on the coffee table to make the best of your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!

"Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants" ("Happily Ever After") is a cleverly written examination of contemporary views on love, lust, marriage, infidelity, and the single life. Writer/Director/Actor Yvan Attal has come up with a winner, an entertaining, funny, and ultimately thoughtful treatise on how we cope with partnering.Three men work together in a car dealership. Vincent (Yvan Attal) is the apparently happily married man with a beautiful wife Gabrielle (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and child. Georges (Alain Chabat) on the other hand is in a tumultuous marriage with Nathalie (Emmanuelle Seigner) who has gender issues that go far beyond feminism and negatively influence their child. Fred (Alain Cohen) is single, bedding every lovely woman he encounters, balancing trysts between mornings, afternoons, and evenings and is deeply envied for his Don Juanism. But Fred actually longs for the sense of belonging that married men enjoy.The men's lives intertwine on many levels. Most important, we discover that Vincent has a lover (Angie David) despite his idyllic married life and while it is Georges whom one would expect to seek solace from a lover, he remains faithful to his nagging wife! Gabrielle senses Vincent's affair and encounters a sexy man in a music shop (Johnny Depp) who begins to preoccupy her thoughts. She is a real estate broker and comes close to an assignation with a client but remains faithful. All the while she daydreams about her brief encounter with Depp and satisfies her wandering eye with those memories. Fred discovers that one of his paramours is pregnant and happily decides to leap into the married fray. The only 'adults' sharing advice here are Vincent's long married parents (Anouk Aimée and Claude Berri in very welcome comeback cameos!) and it is this 'standard' that adds the final humor to the film.The manner in which all three men deal with their living situations asks as many questions as it gives answers. Attal finds joy in all forms of coupling and is careful to offer all sides of decisions his characters make in arriving at what provides them happiness. This is a smart movie with terrific twists. There is just enough slapstick (an all out food fight between Vincent and Gabrielle - real life husband and wife team Attal and Gainsbourg - that proves to be one of the fun-loving bits of silliness that binds their marriage) to keep the mood light. Not a profound film, but a joyous French comedy handled by total pros! In French and English with subtitles. Recommended. Grady Harp

I walked out of this film after fifty minutes and would have been better off had I left after ten minutes.This film provides an example that the French are as capable of making films as bad as mainstream American trash. Here we focus on married couples, one of which--an Indian couple--hardly receives any attention because they represent a still-loving pair after fifteen or so years of marriage.Instead, the remaining husbands, Vincent and Georges, plus their single friend Fred, are the focus of attention. All of them are sexist louts only concerned with talking about bedding women and discussing women's T&A. Fred is a stereotype: the ugly guy you would think no woman would look at twice but who is, in fact, juggling a string of women. But then none of the male or female characters is developed in any depth here.It's hard to believe a film would waste time on such guys. Their wives would be better off divorced from these sexist pigs and their children probably would be better off without them, too. The lifestyle these people are shown living is remarkably like that of too many Americans seen in mainstream films--arguing with each other, spending too much time in front of a TV set, overeating, and overweight. Of course, in French films, there's plenty of smoking, but it often looks chic. Not here, where Gabrielle is shown cooking in one scene with a cigarette dangling out of her lips. Ugh! Even the apartments these people live in are ugly. Gabrielle's kitchen could use the services of a good cleaning company.The narrative line of the film is fractured. In the opening scene, Vincent comes into a bar and picks up his own wife, whom two other men are also trying to pick up. At this point, we don't understand that Vincent and Gabrielle are married. This makes for a very confusing opening to say the least.Elsewhere in the film, similar chronology tricks are employed. I hadn't the least interest in the characters and was be-damned if I was going to try to figure out the fractured chronology. As in the atrocious "The Constant Gardener," the in-your-face technique (swish pans and rack focusing in particular here) seem an attempt to distract viewers from the humorless, lousy story.At one point, Johnny Depp has a cameo moment with Gabrielle in a record store. Depp looks awful, as if he needed a shower, a shave, and a haircut as well as the services of the makeup people on the set. I understand that in a later scene, Depp reappears as a client to whom Gabrielle, a real estate agent, shows an apartment. And in that scene in an elevator going up to that apartment Gabrielle and the nameless character Depp plays at last have sex. Ho-hum. I obviously didn't miss a thing by walking out when I did.During the fifty minutes I was in the audience at the 19th Street Theatre in Allentown, PA, I heard no laughter at all from an audience of about 70 people. During a food fight scene (Can you believe it?) between Gabrielle and Vincent, I heard a few titters of laughter, that sounded like an embarrassed response, as if the titters came from people who were asking themselves, "What are we doing watching something like this?" I couldn't understand why the entire audience didn't arise en masse and leave the theatre.