Jacques Disses Movies

Elements of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream are mixed with a few doses of Bell, Book and Candle in the French Rendez-Moi Ma Peau. A contemporary witch decides to switch the personalities of two wildly divergent mortals. The comic complications involve the "uptight" character's attempts to adapt to a freewheeling lifestyle, and vice versa. Some potent satirical points are made, but for the most part we're in this for the laughs, and nothing but the laughs. Director Patrick Schulmann doubled as the film's screenwriter, then trebled as musical composer. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

A tall and gangly Victoire (Liselotte Christian) arrives in Paris looking for the ideal French lover -- and because she stands well above many of her preceding romantic partners, that is an added dimension to consider. As she finds and drops a series of possibilities -- a free-wheeling sociologist, an up-tight intellectual, and a dentist fixated on sports -- she begins to wonder if this simple quest may turn out to be an impossibility after all. Although director Annette Carducci) tends to stereotype the male characters, their characterizations fit the premises of a light comedy. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

The serpentine plotline of Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita begins its 117-minute slither when punkish, psychotic, and drug-ridden Nikita (Anne Parillaud) fires her gun into a cop's face following the stick-up of a drug store, and is promptly imprisoned. She is thrown into a dank cell, then injected with a substance and told it is a lethal toxin. Instead of dying, however, the comes to in an all-white interrogation room, where French intelligence officer Bob (Tchéky Karyo), informs her that an alternate to execution exists: she can receive covert government training as an assassin. She accepts the bid, is rigorously trained, and later returns to society as a seemingly normal and gentle civilian, but falls in love with a drugstore employee while she's waiting for that first government assignment. The paradoxical concept of a young woman blossoming socially while carrying out cold-blooded murders was downplayed when La Femme Nikita was remade in America as the silly and disappointing Point of No Return, directed by John Badham with Bridget Fonda in the lead. A far less sociopathic TV-series version of La Femme Nikita surfaced on the USA cable network in early 1997. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi