Robin Harsch Movies

One man's inability to understand contemporary cinema leads him into a strange new world in this offbeat comedy drama from Swiss writer and director Lionel Baier. When his girlfriend Christine (Elodie Weber) gets a job teaching school in a small country town, Francois (Robin Harsch) moves with her and finds himself looking for work. Francois stumbles into a job at the tiny local newspaper, and the job of writing movie reviews falls to him. Francois doesn't know the first thing about cinema, and for his first review he plagiarizes a negative review from a highbrow film journal. The venomous notice gets Francois banned from the local movie house, so he begins traveling to Lausanne, where he attends press screenings with a handful of noted Swiss critics. Francois tries to convince the other writers that he's a knowledgeable peer, though his attempts to mimic their academic analysis of current movies are clumsy at best, and his efforts to impress beautiful critic Rosa (Natacha Koutchoumov) lead to a severe public humiliation. However, Rosa finds herself sexually attracted to Francois despite his foolish appearance, and he begins living a double life as an intellectual while still writing inconsequential filler for his small-town journal. Un Autre Homme (aka Another Man) was an official selection at the 2008 Locarno Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide