Misery meets profundity in 'Happily'

June 10, 2005|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

The original French title of ''Happily Ever After" translates to ''And They Got Married and Had Many Children." That's colloquially about the same as our fairy-tale cliché, ''they lived happily ever after," but the English title carries a sting that writer-director-star Yvan Attal doesn't quite intend. Everyone may be miserable in this funny, ribald, unexpectedly profound tale of married Parisian yuppies, but the joke and the tragedy is that they don't have to be.

Stylish and only superficially superficial, ''Happily Ever After" plunks us down with three male friends as they dance on the edge of their 40s. Hotel manager Georges (Alain Chabat) is in full, nuclear midlife crisis, married to the sharp-tongued Nathalie (Emmanuelle Seigner) and cursed with a child he doesn't much like. Vincent (Attal), a shaggy car salesman, adores his young son (Ruben Marx) but seems to have lost the pulse of his marriage to Gabrielle (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Attal's spouse in real life), an attractively moody realtor. (Warning: This is Paris, so everyone looks better than you do.)

The odd man out is Fred (Alain Cohen), Vincent's co-worker and an easygoing bachelor who appears to have the phone number of every model in France. This results in moments of fine comic cruelty when he has to juggle two cellphone conversations at lunch while Georges and Vincent look on in seething awe. ''You know nothing about married women," he teases them when they gripe about their wives.

But Fred is unhappy, too -- he longs for lasting bliss -- and the mysterious fickleness of men becomes the dominant subject of ''Happily Ever After," even as Gabrielle becomes the movie's increasingly touching central figure. She finds herself weeping in cafes as she wonders where her marriage has gone; she watches, appalled, as her 5-year-old son flirts with a high school girl on a bus, a scene that prompts us to wonder whether it's possible to cheat on one's mother.

Gabrielle finds herself considering adultery -- as a daydream, as a thrill, as revenge for her husband's distance -- and Attal dramatizes her turmoil in scenes whose acuity and grace can leave you breathless. In one, she banters with a sexy older man looking at an apartment and has a sudden vision of her life as a divorced mother. In another, the movie's swooning highlight, she finds herself at a Virgin Megastore listening station standing next to a Famous Celebrity (played, obligingly, by a Famous Celebrity), trading avid glances with him while Radiohead's ''Creep" plays out in its gorgeous, neurotic entirety. (The movie uses the band's songs and other music extremely well throughout.)