Souvenir

This anemic French drama is lucky to have Isabelle Huppert as star; the seemingly ageless actress has spent decades masterfully portraying characters who live within a shell of mystery and inscrutability, yet who consistently invite an audience’s empathy. And that’s still the case with Souvenir, although the story falls short of its potential. Huppert plays Liliane, a seemingly marginal worker in a pâté factory, who lives a friendless, anonymous life, drinking at night in the company of TV game shows. Her existence hums along until a new co-worker—a young boxer named Jean (Kévin Azaïs)—recognizes her as a briefly famous singer named "Laura" who barely lost a Eurovision song contest to ABBA years before. Eager to rectify the downward spiral of Laura’s career after that loss, Jean becomes her lover and convinces her to let him manage her comeback. Souvenir is basically a variation on all those iterations of A Star is Born, this one marked by pouty, boy-man Jean’s distaste for show business machinations and relationships (notably, Jean still lives at home with his parents). Co-writer and director Bavo Defurne brings impressive visual acuity and wit to a story about a long-vanished entertainer resurfacing in the rarefied air of mass celebrity, although the odd-couple romance suffers from the glaring imbalance between the two leads. A strong optional purchase. (T. Keogh)