Looking for Hortense.

Sometimes its nice to indulge one’s self in a simple traditional bourgeois French comedy. Directed and co-written by Pascal Bonitzer and set in Paris. Looking for Hortense (2012) is a story of a man that appears to have the weight of the world placed firmly upon his shoulders.

Damien Hauer, played by Jean-Pierre Bacri, has a four-day growth and hang dog air. He is a lecturer who teaches Asian culture to businessmen one day a week. His marriage to Iva, played by the ever-dependable Kristin Scott Thomas, is on the rocks. She is very rarely at home. Her work involves directing and adapting a play for the theatre that seems to include becoming emotionally attached to her leading man and getting home in the early hours of the morning. They have an adolescent son, Noe; whose relationship with his father is on a sounder footing than with his mother, so when Damien final turns his wife out, the boy stays with his father in their spacious apartment. Damien’s own father Sebastien is a judge and one of the highest-ranking civil servants in France - and bi-sexual. Before Iva moved in with her young actor she had asked her husband to approach her father in law to get a work permit for a Serbian female friend of Iva’s brothers girlfriend. But what Damien does not realise is that a young woman he has met quite by accident Aurore (Isabelle Carre) and has fallen in love with, is really the visa less immigrant girl Zorica.

A relationship drama that’s enjoyable and one that puts a smile on your face, well directed with some fine acting and as customary with modern French films great to look at.