Bye Bye Blondie

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Audience Member Acclaimed and controversial French author Virginia Despentes made her directorial debut more than a decade ago with the unsettling rape revenge art house film "Baise-Moi". Despentes concentrated on literature after the endeavor, but in 2012 she returned as a filmmaker with "Bye Bye Blondie," an adaptation of her own novel. The movie concentrates on the dramatic, stormy love between two women with a shared past. Gloria (Béatrice Dalle) is a free soul, an artist and a former wild girl who never allowed the essence of Punk to leave her. She leads a grounded, down-to-earth life full of hardship but caring friends. Gloria's er Francis (Emmanuelle Béart) is a host of a bourgeois TV show, a woman in an affluent marriage with an elderly author, as gay as she is. She has moved as far away from their once shared lifestyle as one can. On an unexplained whim, Francis seeks out Gloria, has her limousine drive to her and does all she can in order to rekindle their buried passion. Dalle and Béart are both big names and they do a decent job in portraying an odd tangle of a relationship between two adult women. But even better are Soko and Clara Ponsot in the various flashback scenes depicting the past of the characters. They meet during the 80's in a mental hospital, fall in dysfunctional love and let their troubled, fluctuating identities consume each other. They are punks, skinheads, anarchists. Their love is always troubled, filled with a constant power struggle and intense emotion that eclipses all sensibility. As it reawakens, that love again robs the women of their reason, but this time their conflict is different. It's the conflict between two people who have had their own lives on very different social levels. Gloria sees Francis as a traitor to freedom of expression, Francis is longing for her wild youth but finds it distant and unattainable, Gloria's antics dangerous and volatile. With such a starring duo and an avant garde director, "Bye Bye Blondie" is rather toothless and in many ways amateurish. It looks big and honed on the surface- and a few scenes display true directorial vision- but the pacing is off all of the time. The story is structured in a clumsy way, and the plot emerges slightly implausible, the character interaction overly melodramatic. Oddly, all the problems apply to the present-day narrative. the history of the women would have made a much better film on it own, in fact I still can't quite believe the back story is really theirs, so different it feels. "Bye Bye Blondie" is as a whole successful; it makes you think, keeps you in its grip and leaves you with strong lasting impressions. But when you zoom in you discover that it isn't nearly as masterful as it almost fools you into thinking. It's a miasma of solid elements that somehow fail to attain a balance between them. I can recommend it, but be warned. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/01/23 Full Review Audience Member Author, director and certified provocateur Virginie Despentes follows up her controversial debut feature, Rape Me, with the far less risqué and much more tenderhearted tale of punked out lesbian love, Bye Bye Blondie. Starring Emmanuelle Beart and Beatrice Dalle as a pair of Sex Pistols-worshipping gals who try to rekindle an affair they began several decades earlier, the film is as cinematically freewheeling as it is emotionally sincere in its portrayal of a star-crossed couple struggling to make it together for a second time Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 01/21/23 Full Review Audience Member Despentes dans l'approximatif a du mal a rendre l'energie a laquelle elle aspire et n'evite pas le ridicule des situations quand il s'agit d'agiter le milieu bobo de la culture. Une bravade revee post ado un peu vaine. Rated 1/5 Stars •  Rated 1 out of 5 stars 01/15/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Bye Bye Blondie

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