Tout ce qui Brille

Saw Tout ce qui Brille (AKA All That Glitters) (thanks, Nina!) It was a film about the dangers of high society. The film revolves around these two girls who are such adorably good friends that they talk in a dense jargon of in-jokes and nonsense words. They are pugnaciously bratty to others but in a tough, winning way. I was more inclined to side with the girls against the world. They meet up with some high-society lesbians (I think lesbians anyway) who at first think they're one the rich beautiful people. Soon however, they are passing their coats to the girls and asking them to look after their kids.

One of the girls falls begrudgingly into this servant role and the other finds herself a sugar-daddy, repulsively semi-whoring herself out (semi-spoiler, and because this film is about the dangers of money, the sugar daddy thing does not exactly work out well.) This drives a wedge between the two girls and serves as a cautionary tale against the corrupting powers of money and pretension.

Around the girls orbit a supporting cast of embarrassing low-class friends, awkward family, and assorted captial-c Characters. The film is overall quite pleasant. Even the sad parts are kind of sweet in a way. You get the sense that the girls have both grown into better people, just people who don't want to see each other any more. It reminded me of The Devil Wears Prada in its tone and message. The themes are serious, but the action is usually not.

Take all of the above with a grain of salt however, because the subtitles I was using were babelfish.com-translated from the French subs for the hearing impaired. It lightened the mood sometimes. After a big fight between the girls, I bust out laughing when "melancholy orchestra" appeared at the bottom of my screen. Also the girls may have been speaking perfectly normal french, but I get shit like

"Elvis love you."
"That's nice. I love it too."

or

"Give him. I do not want this bag of shit."
"On galley to move you, and thou mouths."

What??? I can kind of follow but it makes everything into choppy poetry. No better subtitles exist online and the DVD only has french subtitles (at least on amazon anyway.) But I guess that's France for you. Ugh. A cute little movie with zen koans for dialogue.