A movie spun-off of a TV series is inevitably going to be more rewarding to fans of that series who know all the back stories of the characters and get the jokes that come from being that character, or breaking character as that character.
And a common problem with such adaptations, or movies made by veteran TV writers, is not knowing what to cut, how many characters and incidents they can stuff in, since excess baggage can be a terrible drag on the pace of it all.
The first isn’t an issue in the Netflix film of “Call My Agent!” The second? Kind of an the elephant in the room, as this unfolding-disaster farce charms and tickles here and there, but only gets up to speed a couple of times over the course of its two plodding hours.
Because slow-burns and “anticipation” aside, film comedy is a medium that begs for speed.
“Call My Agent! The Movie” is based on a five-year-run TV series from France about talent agents and the talent they deal with. But the cutthroat agents and agencies and the thin-skinned “talent” they “handle” are more of a side concern, this time around.
The idea is to pick up the characters five years after the run of that show, when Ms. Ambitious, Organized Pushy-britches Andréa (Camille Cottin) has gotten a script together and is about to direct her first film. The far sunnier secretary turned agent turned producer Noémie (Laure Calamy) is already a succes, running one of the biggest hits on French TV.
The plot is basically everything that can go wrong with a movie ticking down towards its start-of-production date, and afterwards. And then there are child-rearing problems involving lesbian working mom Andréa. The fact that Noémie’s star is rising — she’s called on to produce the untiled “true story” thriller — and still sleeping with and living with her aged mentor, an agent (Thibault de Montalembert) who is losing clients for “somebody younger” — leads to more conflict, the melodramatic kind.
The inside-the-movies stuff is fun if over-familiar. One star would rather bail out of this to do a bit part in a new Wes Anderson film, and his replacement has “history” with his co-star.
A funny touch — French actors Laetitia Casta and Vincent Macaigne play daffy, highly-strung versions of themselves as reluctant co-stars in these roles.
Another cute bit — getting a meeting with George Clooney to see if he’ll agree to star. Noémie, whom Andréa has hired to be her “stand-in” producer, a push-over who’ll let Andréa walk all over her, crashes that meeting and procedes to test Clooney’s yen for working with people who’ll “tell me the truth” by critiquing his writer/director/star vehicle flop “Monuments Men.”
“There’s no pace” stings just as much in French accented English (the film is available in subtitled French or dubbed into English) as it would in any Hollywoodese.
That “pace” problem applies to this movie, as well. Longtime fans of the series may get a kick out of onetime office boy turned agent in training and now “actor” Herve (Nicolas Maury) overthinking his bit part as a hunter in the film and serving as bitchy gay confessor for Noémie. But there are too many characters in this for all of them — their foibles, concerns and “issues” — to be serviced into something funny.
Eva Longoria plays herself as a producer setting up shop in Paris, bashing Andréa’s script in classic Hollywood fashion. But that scene, like many others, doesn’t land a laugh or really serve the plot.
That plot has a “diva”(not really) tame wild boar and her handler on set, secrets the actors are keeping from their director and producer and vice verssa, accidents and domestic melodrama that’s never more than a cliche.
Cottin — she was Matt Damon’s foil in the Marseilles thriller “Stillwater” — is the stand-out in the cast, giving her first-time/writer-director character some edge, if not the quite the comically despairing agony of seeing her dream come to pieces due to the weather, timing, an animal and “other people.” She hits manic notes at time, and a lot more of that might have given this “Noises Off” some momentum.
I dare say most of the edges have been worn off the series. The back-stabbing, manuevering, cajoling and flattering lies that are in an agent’s repertoire are pretty watered down in director Émilie Noblet’s second feature film, in which several screenwriters ensure that there’s a whole lot of “make nice” going on.
That’s not usually amusing as a guiding principle in comedy.
If there’s a “message” here, it’s that agents might be more suited to directing than we’ve ever given them credit for — sweet-talking talent, organized and on-task hustlers who can keep the insane hours getting a film made entails.
The fun stuff is seeing actors vamp up alternate versions of themselves, but even that’s a tad hug-it-out mild by comic standards.
And whatever get-everybody-in-here fan service the producers had in mind, this film wants to be a streamlined farce. Situations and characters give us that expectation. But it never gets up that head of speed necessary to turn giddy.
So I guess George Clooney isn’t the only one who has a hard time with “pace.”
Rating: TV-MA, profanity
Cast: Camille Cottin, Laure Calamy,
Thibault de Montalembert, Grégory Montel, Laetitia Casta, Vincent Macaigne and Nicolas Maury, with Eva Longoria and George Clooney.
Credits: Directed by Émilie Noblet, scripted by Fanny Herrero, Lison Daniel, with Violane Bellet and Benjamin Charbit, based on the French TV series. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:57
