My Own Worst Nightmare is a distinctively French farce with Isabelle Huppert as Agathe, an executive director of an art gallery and a model member of the bourgeoisie. Her problems are distinctively French, including her husband François (André Dussollier) and his love affair with a much younger women. This isn’t exactly her worst nightmare, rather that comes in the form of Patrick (Benoît Poelvoorde), a handyman living with his son out of his truck (his truck advertises a sketchy bikini carwash).
Agathe and Patrick’s’ sons become inseparable and Patrick dates her housekeeper (who has no shame about engaging in some very strange sex games with Patrick, while the family is home). Patrick, who had spent 7 years in jail is for all other purposes not a bad guy, but one that doesn’t quite fit in. He turns to Julie, a social worker, for assistance – introducing her and François.
My Own Worst Nightmare is a well-crafted and often hilarious look at the complexities of bourgeois life: or the life Agathe imagined. Huppert is flawless (as usual) as a woman who is used to having control of many situations, finding herself challenged. Director Anne Fontaine has chronicled such women in her past work (including Coco Before Chanel, The Girl From Monaco, Nathalie… and Dry Cleaning) and here she adapts the sensibility with a greater sense of parody. She is having fun, but not poking fun at the plight of the parties concerned, although there is a sense they should know better, they find themselves falling into the trap of cliché.
And that is where My Own Worst Nightmare bubbles into a nightmare of sorts: almost getting away from Fontaine, it grows slightly too big, too absurd, and before we know it Agathe is at perhaps the creepiest movie carwash since The Sweet Hereafter. Still the film has fun with what it does, cobbled together from elements of much better films and aligned in the cannon of character and situation study that Fontaine is known for in her past work. Here, unlike Coco Chanel, is a women partially in charge of her own destiny weighed down perhaps by a too familiar plot.
What a film such as this comes down to, the central question, is does it work? I did laugh, but I also felt sympathy for Patrick and Agathe. Here is a film that’s part light-hearted French farce, part social commentary, and an effective drama — a little too much thrown into the blender with a more than capable team. It feels like an exercise that stops short of achieving its ultimate goal — assuming it has one.
My Own Worst Nightmare is now in limited release.