Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

"Les poupées russes," (The Russian Dolls, 2005) is writer-director Cédric Klapisch's sequel to his 2002 "L'auberge espagnole" in which economics graduate student and would-be technocrat Xavier Rousseau (Romain Duris) left his girlfriend Martine (Audrey Tautou) in Paris to spend a year studying in Barcelona. There he shared a flat with five people with different mother tongues (and, eventually, a Francophone Belgian). Near the end, Martine broke up with Xavier and he walked away from his bureaucratic job on the first day to write (to write L'auberge espagnole).

"Dolls" picks up five years later. Xavier's L'auberge espagnole has not been published and Xavier is doing celebrity (supermodel) ghostwriting and a chick-flic screenplay. The company merges or at least turns the project into a BBC co-production in English. Xavier protests that he speaks English and suggests that he do the English-language screenplay with his former Barcelona room-mate Wendy (Kelly Reilly), a writer known to the BBC producers.

Xavier starts Chunneling back and forth to London to work with Wendy while interviewing a 25-year-old illiterate celebrity's memoirs (Lucy Gordon as Celia). Wendy has been supporting a lout. Wendy and Xavier have Feelings, though Xavier has "commitment issues."

The Barcelona apartment mates converge on St. Petersburg, where Wendy's once xenophilic and resolutely monolingual speaker of English has fallen in love with a ballerina (Evguenya Obraztsova), learned Russian, and pursued Natacha to St. Petersburg.

Xavier has moved into the guest room of his lesbian soulmate from the Barcelona days, Isabelle (Cécile De France). One of her tricks or friends gives him a black eye for his nastiness to one of his tricks (Aïssa Maïga). (A nastiness that seems quite out of character, though his unresolved feelings for Martine triggered it.)

Having donned a dress to pretend to be Xavier's fiancée through a dinner with Xavier's 98-year-old grandfather, she forces him to wear it afterward, which he gamely does. (It's difficult to decide which of them looks funnier in a dress and high heels—Isabelle looks more pained, but Duris has a chest almost as hairy as Jason Patric's.)

Overall, "Dolls" is less sitcommy than "Auberge." There are LOL moments, and there are some fast-forwarding of getting characters from one place to another and splitting the screen from time to time. And there is full frontal nudity as the naked Xavier runs after the naked Neus (Irene Montalà) down a staircase and out into the street.

The amorous relationships of the older, but not notably wiser (except in the case of William) characters pushing 30 are more serious than when they were grad students away from home in the Barcelona motley crew. I would not go so far as to say they are leading lives of quiet desperation. We don't see how some are leading their lives at all. Wendy is close to panic (there is no mention of the "biological clock," but I don't think I'm imagining that it is part of her feeling an acute need to settle down with a right guy) and Xavier is unhappy about prostituting himself as a writer and that one girlfriend after another dumps him. (Come to think of it, there is something of Antoine Doinel in Xavier.)

Duris had the charm needed for romantic comedy (he was not yet the formidable actor of The Beat My Heart Skipped and Dans Paris) and Kelly Reilly was more engaging in the sequel than she was in the original. Their relationship is the central one. Porcupines do manage to mate and these two are Made For Each Other, though slower than the audience to realize this. And if the heretofore loutish William can learn Russian and move to a communal apartment in St. Petersburg, how can they fail?

The nine-minutes of footage from on the movie set provide no insights, but show Klapisch directing Duris and Reilly in English and something of the difficulty of filming inside a Russian apartment. Klapisch does not discuss the playful editing (of both movies). I'd like to ask Klapisch what he thinks of Truffaut. Not only does Xavier remind me of Antoine Doinel (ca. "Bed and Board"), but the love for playing with the editing reminds me of the young Truffaut if he'd had the software available now.

©  2009, Stephen O. Murray

This is another French find (with dialogue in Russian and English with Duris speaking English and French) for Barbara. I discovered Duris writing for the earlier writeoff she organized.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD