Agathe Cléry....

A new film came out a couple of days ago here in France, called 'Agathe Cléry' by Etienne Chatiliez, starring Valérie Lemercier. The subtitle of the film says 'Elle est blanche, elle est raciste, et elle va devenir noire.'

It's a comedy about a deeply racist woman who works for a cosmetics company which specializes in products for pale skin. She finds out she is suffering from a rare disease of the adrenal glands which makes her skin turn dark. She tries to commit suicide and fails, and then tries to regain her old life. She loses her job and suffers racism firsthand, and through various humiliations and injustices, soon sees the 'other side' of the story. Should be interesting, a comedy about racism.

You won't see advance reviews in Le Monde, Libération, les Cahiers du Cinéma, or Les Inrockuptibles. The producer of the film, Charles Gassot, has banned the aforementioned publications from attending any of the advance screenings, saying that the film has been too long in production and too expensive to make to let the likes of journalists from these publications pan it before it even gets a fighting chance in the theaters.

Apparently this is a common theme at the moment with producers in France, who say it's the general audience who should decide what gets panned and how, not journalists, particularly those who don't 'do' comedies, or whatever genre the particular film is.

So, I guess you pay your money and you take your chance, which can only go one of two ways for the box offices takings.

But I wonder how a film like this would be received in the States...