French filmmaker Alain Berliner (Ma Vie en Rose) gets the chance to work with Demi Moore, in the English language, and in America, but also in France. In the setting of New York City, the actress is Marty, a strong-minded independent single woman and high-powered careerist, head of her own literary agency. In the French provinces, she is Marie, a widow, mother of two girls, and long-distance book reviewer for the New York Times, on an antiquated manual typewriter. In both places, she's got those perfectly hemispherical breasts that don't lie down just because she lies down. And in both places, too, she has total recall of what happens to her alter ego in the other place, and a separate psychiatrist to tell it to. "One day I realized," she explains to us straightaway in voice-over, "I could no longer tell my dream world from my real world." A new angle, this, on the voguish alternative-realities theme. And there's a certain authentic Frenchness about it all, a sort of fourth-generation surrealism that still remembers to grant exact equivalence to the life inside and the life outside. But it is not, in the last analysis, an authentic French film after all. The mystery -- what's real? what's not? -- must eventually be solved, and "closure" be brought. And ruination, regardless, does not wait until the end. Any sense of intrigue in the premise is beaten down all throughout by the swoony, soupy, syrupy Cosmo-girl fantasy of Having It All, of motherhood and freedom, of success and seclusion, of women dictating the terms of relationships, of two-timing without guilt, of candlelight dinners and picnics in the park and balloon-filled birthday parties and shared bathtubs and orgasms every time. It is beaten down, besides, by the greedy, needy Moore, a sponge for flattery. With Stellan Skarsgard, William Fichter. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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