Cinema: Derriere-Garde

THE COOKIES

Directed and Written by JOEL SERIA

Pont-Aven, the setting for much of this loosely structured, deliberately vulgar French comedy, is the seacoast town where Paul Gauguin settled temporarily after abandoning his job and family in the 1880s. The hero of The Cookies is a present-day painter who also throws over a boring wife and job and moves to Pont-Aven. One major difference between the two men, however, is that Gauguin became in his rebellion a leading light of the French avantgarde. The hero of Cookies, both as a man and a painter, is largely obsessed with female buttocks. He is an artist, one might say, of the derriere-garde.

Considering the kind of crude, exuberant fun that might have been had from such a subject, Cookies, when it isn’t forced, is curiously listless. Jean-Pierre Marielle plays the painter well. A few scenes come briefly to life: the manageress of an umbrella shop coyly allowing herself to be seduced; the repressed sister of a Bible salesman peeping at the visiting painter as he undresses for the night; a prostitute, before taking on a customer, matter-of-factly washing his genitals in the sink along with the dishes. But Joel Seria is the kind of literal-minded director who, when a character has to leave his car, cross a road, cut along a field and knock on the door of a house, follows him with the camera every tedious step of the way. The painter may want to be behind his subjects, but the film as a whole makes the mistake of lagging far behind the viewer’s imagination.