This started fairly well and looked like it would be very amusing and for some I know it is. For me though, the characters begin to get rather irritating and by the end really annoying. It seems incomprehensible that any of them would carry on the way they do. 'Carry On', is just about the right expression, too. Director Blanc, who plays the excruciating fat man who thinks his middle aged wife is off with everybody, waffles away in the accompanying 'featurette', seemingly unaware that he has produced something akin to the infamous English series and thinks he's Eisenstein instead. Yes, pretentious is another word that comes to mind, and even if this is based upon an English book and has some elements of the worst of this country's yob/snobby business it is in the end a very French movie. We may overrate our silly soap operas but only the French would consider them 'significant'.

Zillionth French "tranches de vie" comedy gets a bit upgraded through actresses Carole Bouquet and Charlotte Rampling, the only 2 likable characters in the whole flick. The rest of the cast is so obnoxious, self-centered and arrogant you dislike 'em the second they appear on the screen. Especially the oversexed 17-year old daughter, although very pretty, is as they say in French "une emmerdeuse de prémière classe" ( a first-rate pain in......).It may fast-paced and funny in an art-house kindaway but it remains supremely annoying.For some good recent French comedies opt instead of course for 'Amélie', or something with actor Benoit Poelvoorde (Le vélo, Dead weight,Podium)or 'Mission Cleopatre' based on the highly popular french comic books "Asterix".'

It was Francois Ozon's 'Swimming Pool' that really made me sit up and take note of Charlotte Rampling's suitability to french cinema. Her stern facade yet the notion she is longing for sexual freedom suits it to a 't'.After 'Swimming Pool' I made a conscious search for Rampling's other forays into french cinema, and this is one of the surprisingly many i came up with.'Summer Things' seemed to me a bit like a multiple brief encounter. It follows a family riddled with dissatisfaction and their friends over the course of a summer. The daughter off for a 'naughty summer'in Chicago with the boyfriend her parents don't know about, the mother off with her friends all of whom have terrible family problems themselves, and the father who spends the summer liberated from the wife he is confused by, in the arms of his transsexual lover.The characters are all linked in such deliciously complex ways - one of the biggest links being how much they need this change, this summer to not make them change their lives as what is expected of films of this nature, but in fact to learn how to enjoy the lives they already have - this idea was so refreshing, and like 'brief encounter' what made it so real. there weren't any epiphanies, just character developments, life lessons and realisations of the fact that the grass is never as green as we hope it might be.Watch it! :)

As with "Grosse Fatigue" the pair Michel Blanc / Carole Bouquet is at the center of the film. Lots of laughs. Subtle. Interesting characters even if sometimes it could be more subtle (eg : Michel Blanc's character is really extreme).Pour passer une bonne soiree.