Movie Nation

What a curiosity this musical without music turned out to be.

Joshua Logan’s romantic melodrama “Fanny” (1961) has the air of a “let’s do something like ‘Gigi'” about it, another star vehicle for Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier, more gorgeous French locations and source material.

It’s based on the musical Logan and S.N. Behrman based on the plays of French novelist, filmmaker and playwright Marcel Pagnol (the “Jean de Florette” trilogy and the “Fanny/Marius/Cesar” trilogy are his most famous works). It’s set and shot in Marseilles, well-acted, and filmed and edited in the most pedestrian, perfectly-framed-background cover shot, two-shot and “ready for my close-up” style by Logan.

Sixty years after its release, this subdued, overlong and five-times-Oscar-nominated tale never lets us forget “They left out the music,” literally and figuratively.

Caron has the title role, the beautiful daughter of the fishmonger Honorine (Georgette Anys). We meet her on her eighteenth birthday, a young woman (Caron was 30) smitten with her friend since childhood, the about-to-turn 19 bartender Marius (Horst Bucholtz, fresh off of “Magnificent Seven,” and 28 when this came out). His destiny seems to have been set by his father, Cesar (Charles Boyer), the owner of the iconic waterfront Bar de la Marine.

Fanny dreams of Marius, but if Marius could sing, he’d croon “my life, my lover, my lady, is the sea.” Every ship that enters the beautiful, pre-“French Connection” harbor, makes him wistful. And he’s constantly being nagged into acting on this passion by The Admiral (Raymond Bussières), a homeless vagabond sailor and neighborhood character.

Dad isn’t hearing it. “You’re a dreamer, that’s what you are.”

And while Fanny does her dreaming and Marius does his, the aged ships stores merchant Panisse (Chevalier) is still stuck on “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” He’s fixated on Fanny, and the nicest thing his friends, including Cesar, can call him are “you old billy goat” and “70 year-old lecher.” “Eunuch” comes up, too.

But Fanny is aware of his intentions, as is everybody else, including Marius.

“He is rich, and you know how your mother feels about money.”

A love triangle is set up, with each of the three tugging in different directions. “Fanny,” set in the late 20s and cusp-of-WWII ’30s, never lets us forget its ties to older ways of thinking about marriage, “age-inappropriate” as it often still was.

One night of passion will trigger all that is to follow.

As “Fanny” settled into its soapy, edge-of-sappy story, I was struck by the screen compositions — the many scenic views of the harbor, the way the stunning hilltop Basilique Notre-Dame de la Garde fills the background out most every window, especially that of the Bar de la Marine.

Playwright-turned-filmmaker Logan, his legendary DP , Jack Cardiff (“Black Narcissus,” “The African Queen”) and two-time Oscar winning editor William Reynolds (“The Sound of Music,””The Sting” and “The Godfather”) blocked, filmed and edited “Fanny” in the most pedantic, old-fashioned way imaginable.

It’s as if they filmed this as a musical, realized the slim, slight story could never sustain the three-hours-plus running time that would have entailed, and cut the tunes as an afterthought. They didn’t, but that’s how this plays.

Rare is the movie where the “establishing-shot,” “two-shot,” “over-the-shoulder-shot,” and “closeup” rules, chiseled in stone by D.W. Griffith, grabs this much of our attention. The old school players Boyer and Chevalier give us staid performances in wide shot and animated with acting “business” close-ups, further calling attention to this strategy. It’s Filmmaking 101, and you wonder why Logan, who filmed many a play (“Mister Roberts,””Bus Stop,””Picnic”) never grew beyond it.

Sometimes being an “actor’s director” is a trap, and if you want to know why cineastes don’t swoon over Logan’s career, this is the reason. His films are cinematically and dramatically sturdy and stodgy — well-acted, but visually dull.

The veterans in the cast make better impressions than our far-too-worldly, young-but-not-that-young leads. Daniel Auteuil’s French “Fanny” of a few years back at least cast younger players, getting us closer to the dewy-eyed innocence and first-love-passion Pagnol wrote about.

With every rise in emotion, every big statement of longing, this “Fanny” makes us feel a song coming on, that moment when mere words or faraway looks in the key-lit eyes of our stars isn’t enough to “say” what they’re feeling. Logan & Co. never deliver on that promise.

Rating: unrated, adult themes

Cast: Leslie Caron, Charles Boyer, Maurice Chevalier, Horst Bucholtz, Lionel Jeffries, Baccaloni, Raymond Bussières and Georgette Anys.

Credits: Directed by Joshua Logan, scripted by Julius Epstein, based on the musical by Joshua Logan and S.N. Behrman, which was based on the play by Marcel Pagnol. A Warner Brothers release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 2:14

Adam Sandler’s gone, but “Hotel Transylvania,” the animated franchise that refuses to die, is back as “Hotel Transylvania: Transformania” makes its debut as an Amazon Prime release.

Replacement voice Brian Hull so perfectly mimics Sandler’s take on the vampire’s vampire and Transvylvanian hotelier that I almost made a big boo-boo in the credits. I mean, same voice, same not-that-funny line readings? It’s uncanny.

“Transformania” is about a hotel and its staff going through a transition. No, not THAT kind of transition. Drac is ready to hand over the keys to the monstrous hotel to his married adult daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez, a glutton for punishment) and her klutzy “human” husband Johnny (Andy Samberg, aka Sandler: The Next Generation.).

Except…Johnny’s an over-enthusiastic dunce and “the greatest headache in my existence.” Drac tries to back out of the hand-over, to take place at the hotel’s 125th anniversary. He convinces Johnny there’s a Transylvanian real estate law that prohibits “human” ownership.

Luckily, downcast Johnny has an out. The half-robotic dwarf vampire hunter Van Helsing (Jim Gaffigan) has this new “monster transforming ray” gun. Johnny gets turned into a non-human, a dragon.

When Drac realizes Mavis will discover his lie if she sees Johnny, he tries to undo the transformation, and finds himself turned into a human. That’s when the magic “crystal” that makes the gun work breaks.

And that’s how the “father and son (in-law) bonding” trek to South America to find a fresh rock is launched.

Of course Mavis and Drac’s squeeze, Van Helsing’s daughter Ericka (Kathryn Hahn) find out and set out in pursuit of the two. They bring the also-converted-to-humans monstrous hotel staff (Keegan-Michael Key, David Spade, Brad Abrell and Steve Buscemi) and assorted spouses (Molly Shannon, Fran Drescher) along.

What could go wrong? Or right?

The jokes are of the “mosquitoes, the VAMPIRES of the jungle,” “I RESEMBLE that remark” variety. Sun-shy Dracula finally enjoys sunlight, only to over-indulge — “My EYES, my EYES!” He deadpans “Where am I goink to find a shower een the meedle of the JUNGLE?” Instant tropical downpour.

The Sony Animation house style for these films is whiplash-quick actions and over-reactions, in-your-face Tex Avery manic mugging. That covers up some of the tedium of the story, the drabness of the dialogue, but not nearly enough.

The best laughs here come from the transformed blob, Frank(enstein’s monster) waiter, Invisible Man (Spade) and Wolf Man (Buscemi) and Mummy (Key) turning human.

Think what the Invisible Man doesn’t put on to keep himself invisible. Clothes. Yes, there are big’ol butt-crack gags aplenty.

The film carries a cute message that people are like “a toasted marshmallow,” burnt and icky if just judge just what’s on the outside, but delightful and delicious if you consider the inside, too. But that and a couple of laughs are its sole saving graces.

After four films and a TV series, maybe it’s time to mothball this Hotel for a bit.

Rating: PG for some action and rude humor including cartoon nudity.

Cast: The voices of Andy Samberg, Selena Gomez, Brian Hull, Fran Drescher, Keegan Michael Key, David Spade, Jim Gaffigan, Kathryn Hahn and Steve Buscemi

Credits: Directed by Derek Drymon and Jennifer Kluska, scripted by Amos Vernon, Nunzio Radazzo and Genndy Tartakovsky. A Sony Animation release on Amazon.

Running time: 1:38

The studio has been urging viewers not to give away the latest “twist” ending in a long line of such “Oh, he/She/THEY did its” in the “Scream” franchise. As well they should. Nobody should spoil a picture as spoiler-alertable as a “Scream” installment.

But I think I’m on safe ground making one pointed observation about the “requel” (sequel/reboot) “Scream.” The ending sucks.

And it’s not like the movie that precedes that lame, talky, weak-jokey over-the-top violent finale is all that, either. It’s desultory, a rehash of “Scream” story arcs and jokes and tone. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and this latest script is a photocopy of the Kevin Williamson original in a few ways, an inferior updating in others.

But at least the first acts kind of play. They have that “new characters” meet “legacy characters” following the “rules” of a “Scream” movie — called “Stab” in the movie-within-a-movie “meta slasher whodunit” — which get a light updating and recycling this time around.

“Never trust the love interest,” “Never go anywhere alone.” Etc.

It’s great seeing Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox and David Arquette, among others, returning to the franchise (a ghost among them). Campbell may seem like she’s obligated to be here and the faraway look in her eyes suggests Cox is remembering what a very big deal she was in ’96 when the original film came out. And both of them look great for actresses that have lost their action/comic fastballs.

But there’s a lovely Cox/Arquette reunion moment that almost summons up some real emotion. Arquette, in general, comes off the best among the legacy cast — subtle, damaged, shamed into action.

The new characters — most of them related to prior gene lines in the series — include a new “expert” (Jasmin Savoy Brown) who does all the “horror movie explaining” to a designated newbie, the stuff about “requels” and “elevated horror,” the movies much better than “Scream” that include “The Babadook,” “The Witch” and “It Follows.” We hear about “toxic fandom,” the idea that fans demand things that filmmakers kowtow to, “fan service” that can be the undoing of movies like this.

Yes, the new Jamie Lee Curtis “Halloween” ventures are the exception to the rule, and the latest one of those — with pathos, shocks, terror and jolts — is superior to “Scream” in almost every way. It’s no wonder it’s mentioned a few times here. They’re envious.

Other newbies include Melissa Barrera (adequate), as the heroine/victim/bait/villain (you pick) brought back to town after a new “Ghostface” attacks her sister (Jenna Ortega, better). Truth be told, a manic moment here and there doesn’t hide how charisma-starved this pretty young cast is.

The feeling of deja vu, the “What’s your favorite scary movie?” threats from the same-voice (voice box) that Ghostface always has, similar “Ever seen the movie ‘Psycho’?” riffs to tease a possible attack in the bathroom, aren’t sent-up or vamped in a way that let us laugh at the obvious photocopying.

A villain may boast about a killing spree story with “stakes,” but virtually none of the deaths have any heart to them, or wit. They’re just graphic. The frights aren’t original or frightening. Another spoiler alert, beware what’s behind the fridge door you just opened.

The teens and 20somethings show zero emotion for their slaughtered classmates, and toss an equally tone-deaf party of the “Kids Ignore Pandemic” variety.

“Scream” is a movie you want to like out of sentiment. But Wes Craven knew how to make the laughs land and the shocks shock, and the replacement directors don’t.

Even if this “Scream” cleans up at the box office, and who’s to say it won’t, it doesn’t hold a candle or a knife handle to the first two films to come out of this billion dollar idea — that teen horror fans can figure out how to survive a “Scream/Stab” movie simply by calling attention to and mocking the formula for such movies, by playing by “the rules.

This “Scream” mentions the rules only to have characters all but ignore them.

Rating: R (Some Sexual References|Language Throughout|Strong Bloody Violence)

Cast: Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, Jenna Ortega, Melissa Barrera, Mason Gooding, Kyle Gallner, Mikey Madison, Jack Quaid, Marley Shelton, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sonia Ammar.

Credits: Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, scripted by James Vanderbilt, Guy Busick. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:54

“How I Fell in Love with a Gangster” is a Polish “Blow,” “Mesrine” and “American Gangster,” all rolled into one — a mini-series or at least Scorsese-length picture about Poland’s “most renowned criminal of all time.”

Nikodem “Nikoś” Skotarczak had a career that took him from mastering grand theft-auto to cocaine smuggling, from the disco-era ’70s to Eurovision 1998. He became a folk hero for taking over a losing Gdansk soccer team and spending it to victory, for escaping from the cops — German and Polish — time and again.

Maybe now that this long, lurid and soapy saga has come to Netflix, he’ll merit a Wikipedia page of his very own.

Does Nikos’ life and career justify a three-hour-plus saga-length treatment? As a non-Pole, I have to say “nie bardzo.”

Director Maciej Kawulski and his co-screenwriter Krzysztof Gureczny serve up scene after scene that outstays its welcome, many of them not quite pointless, but hard to justify in the context of a movie that begs for pace or something beyond the barest hint of a pulse.

There’s violence, but not a staggering amount of it. There’s a lone car chase, and it’s abbreviated. Considering all the sequences that go on forever, that’s hard to justify.

It claims to be about “How I Fell in Love with a Gangster,” but is almost exclusively about Nikos, from childhood to death, his “Tri City Boys” gang, and not about the legions of women who enrolled in his lifestyle, some for brief stretches, others for longer ones. All we’re meant to gather is that he was great in bed, or on SUV hoods or wherever. We learn so little about the women that they’re mere fashion accessories, not accessories after the fact. One dug his access to cocaine, but the rest gave him children and endured his cheating and give us little notion of being in it for the money or anything else.

Chief among them is our mysterious narrator (Krystyna Janda), interviewed by a Polish journalist or would-be biographer, a woman who serves as our guide to Nikos’ life, who seems to have known every other woman he ever bedded and can’t really explain “How I Fell in Love with a Gangster.”

Tomasz Wlosok plays Nikos from his 20s — when he was a rugby player by day, bar bouncer by night, part of a whole gang who “ran the city” — to his death. It’s a charismatic enough performance, but only a handful of the endless succession of scenes really register, the “red letter dates” in the mobster-in-the-making’s history.

He went to Hungary and became “king of Budapest” thanks to the ease with which even European cars were stealable and easily resold in the last years of the Iron Curtain. He talks his way out of gunpoint confrontations, and we learn that “windows played an important role in Nikos’ life” — he was always jumping out of them to escape a jam. He and a minion worked out how to get past the ignition locks that threatened to kill their business in the late ’70s, and an Italian lieutenant is the one who gets him interested in moving cocaine.

There’s also a somewhat clever, somewhat funny (not funny enough) German prison break.

But if we know anything about our mob sagas, it’s that the coke trafficker who grows fond of his product isn’t long for this world, as that’s a signal that the story arc — abused child to thug to mobster to “boss” to arrests, decline and a final “hit” — is complete.

Two of his women stand out in the screenario. Agnieszka Grochowska makes the one he never quite gets over, “Jet,” a sex worker turned turned concubine, memorable and romantic. Julia Wieniawa-Narkiewicz plays the uninhibited Nikita, his last, with a trashy verve.

The “tragedies” of Nikos’ life — a wife’s suicide, a car accident that kills much of his family — aren’t written, edited or played (off-camera) in any way that manages to be moving.

The film makes decent use of an array of (perhaps faked) locations, and generations of stealable VW’s and Mercedes.

But the dialogue — in Polish with English subtitles, or dubbed — is generic in the extreme. “I will be the king of this city, like a tiger!”

Wlosok has few moments to really let it all out — one, when he’s berating a German cop (Klaudiusz Kaufmann) about Polish pronunciations, screaming at him to repeat “Your papa’s proper bread has no jam!” over and over.

Despite his best efforts, I pretty much lost patience with this at about the dawdling one hour mark.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Tomasz Wlosok, Antoni Królikowski, Agnieszka Grochowska, Magdalena Lamparska and
Krystyna Janda

Credits: Directed by Maciej Kawulski, scripted by Maciej Kawulski, Krzysztof Gureczny. A Netflix release.

Running time: 3:06

Ukrainian filmmaker Kateryna Gornostai reaches for docu-drama reality with her debut feature film, “Stop-Zemlia,” a peek inside the lives of high school teens facing final exams and “the future” with childish obliviousness and adult concern and uncertainty.

The ground covered, the high school “types” glimpsed or followed, are too familiar for a Western viewer to be as fascinated with these kids as she is. And the film’s structure, formatted as a “mockumentary” with the kids being interviewed at graduation, with all their living through that last year covered as flashbacks, is wearily confessional.

But it’s an intriguing sort of stream-of-consciousness drift through one’s teens, demonstrating a universality of experience that anybody who attended high school in the developed West would recognize.

Masha, played by Maria Fedorchenko, is the primary focus, although we drop in on half a dozen or so lives during the course of this year. She is pretty, model-thin with short hair that she’s not shy about coloring, but a kid wracked by anxiety. Masha is working a lot of things out, mostly out of sight of her concerned parents, sometimes with the help of her two besties.

Yana (Yana Isaienko) is her primary sounding board, cute and given to crushes that she impulsively judges and rules out once the actual “date” arrives. The Culkin-stocking-capped Senia (Arsenii Markov) is friendly, with a hint of “haunted” about him. Masha has to take him out of shooting class (teenagers breaking down and reassembling AK-47s, etc.) because “there was shelling on my street” and he’s understandably triggered.

We are in Ukraine, after all, which Russia has coveted since time immemorial.

As the kids study and take class trips and drink and smoke various substances and flirt and play Blind Man’s Bluff and Spin the Bottle, you get the sense there’s a lot of “experimenting” going on. Which is handy, because Masha likes to have sleepovers with her friends.

But this isn’t really that kind of movie. Gornostai is more interested in creating a texture, a milieu, and populating it with “average” (but generally quite attractive, and all clear-skinned and thin) teens than in giving us the big John Hughes romantic “destiny” coming-of-age moments.

Masha might be right for sexually noncommittal, lonely, distant and handsome Sasha (Oleksandr Ivanov), who is being raised by his doting (he’s her only company) single mom. But don’t bet on it.

The interviews, interspersed throughout this two hour ramble, probe what the kids think about “love” and “being in love” and “life after school” and the like. The answers are revealing only in the most generic sense.

And the classroom and field trip scenes have a “seen this in the US, Canada, Britain, France and elsewhere” quality as well. Well, there’s less security in science museums (with spacesuits, spacecraft) in the former U.S.S.R. than there is here.

As interested as Gornostai is in showing us “types” — the giggling, teasing pretty girl who’s a bit of a bully, the tall, handsome boy (Andrii Abalmazov) whose smile gets him what he wants, but whose wants are limited and dull (he’s a bit of a bully, too) — she does almost nothing with them.

No one is “that” mean, that confused, that bullied or that in love.

It’s kind of refreshing that Gornostai has chosen to show how less-obsessed-with-sex Ukrainian kids are than the average Hollywood film insists American teen are. But you have to wonder how accurate that is. She’s asking them about love and romance and relationships, and it could very well be that these 17-18 year-olds are more grown up than their American “Kissing Booth” counterparts. Still, this is just as scripted as any California teen rom-com or sex farce. Who’s to say how accurate it is?

And lacking a more coherent organizing principle than “fly on the wall/slice of life” renders “Stop-Zemlia” — which takes its title from a sort of long-running game of slap-tag — somewhat colorless, if not entirely pointless.

Rating: unrated, nudity, teen smoking and drinking, profanity

Cast: Maria Fedorchenko, Yana Isaienko, Arsenii Markov, Oleksandr Ivanov, Andrii Abalmazov

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kateryna Gornostai. An Altered Innocence release.

Running time: 2:02

Rural Texas, 1979, maybe not the best place and time to film your X-rated feature film.

I mean, where would you get your dailies processed?

Not a state known for tolerance and they have lots of chainsaws down there.

March 18, this Ti West thriller starring Jenny Ortega, Brittany Snow and Kid Cudi, an A-24 release (their brand is “out there”) makes its way to a screen near you.

“The House” may be the most delightfully strange project Netflix has ever put its money behind.

They’re calling this Nexus Studios stop-motion animated tale a darker-than-dark “comedy series,” but don’t you believe it. It’s a warped anthology, with three separate directing teams, one for each chapter. Irish playwright Enda Walsh scripted the macabre and whimsical “House,” which plays as a movie, 98 minutes of the odd history of a British home of mysterious origins.

It begins with “And heard within, a lie is spun,” a Dickensian tale of how the house was built. The growing country family of Raymond (voiced by Matthew Goode) and Penelope (Claudie Blakely) have just enough time to absorb the insults of his snobby visiting relatives (Miranda Richardson voices one) at his and Penny’s modest adobe when a mysterious benefactor offers to build them a new house on a nearby hill.

Raymond can put down the bottle and give his family the life they deserve, and Penny has a new sewing machine to keep her busy. But little Mabel (Mia Goth) and toddler Isobel see workmen and others, hiding behind the scenes. They hear the weeping of the benefactor’s factotum, Mr. Thomas (Mark Heap). They recognize the peril, the “trap” this house is, before their parents.

In “Then lost is truth that can’t be won,” a new owner/developer (voiced by Jarvis Cocker) has renovated the place on the cheap in the present day, and is scrambling to flip the house — it’s now surrounded by the city — the day of its “open house.”

The developer is a mouse, as are the many visitors to that open house. But they’d all be more impressed if he could keep other vermin — insects — at bay.

And in “Listen again and seek the sun,” in the future, the land around the house is flooded — climate change? The latest owner, the talking cat Rosa (Susan Wokoma) has subdivided the ancient pile into studio apartments, and she too is renovating it. But her tenants Jen and Elias (Helena Bonham Carter and Will Sharpe) only pay in barter — fish he catches, “crystals” she consults.

Perhaps a visiting hippy handyman friend (Paul Kaye) of crystal-loving Jen is the answer to Rosa’s prayers. Or not.

The animation, which begins with felt doll-like “people,” yarn-covered trees and includes creative uses of wool and cotton (simulating fire in a fireplace), meshes together brilliantly. Doll “people” give way to fuzzy rodents and then to fuzzier “Fantastic Mr. Fox” style cats, each chapter with similar production design, although the opening episode/act is largely set in sinister darkness.

The dialogue can be ominous or hilarious. Consider this pearl from Cosmos, the Tibetan hymn-chanting hippy “traveler” and house-repairer who sails up in a boat.

“There are never any ‘plans’ with me. There’s only moments snatched from the wind!” Cosmos isn’t into “invasive” work like plumbing. He wants to “nourish the soil of the house, enlighten its chakra!”

The picture opens creepy, transitions to icky-funny and finishes light and amusing, with all the stories seated neatly on one big theme — a house is a “trap.” Whatever Raymond & Family gain from moving up, the demands the place makes and the closing-off means of escaping it hardly make it worth it.

Later owners just confirm that prognosis.

I was spooked and tickled and nodding in recognition of a “dream house’s” hidden nightmares, the cash-sucking burden of needing a quick and sloppy refit and re-sale and the bigger one of renting to deadbeat tenants.

If they’d presented this as a movie, it could have been an Oscar contender. The best thing about labeling “The House” a series is the prospect that we’ve just caught Season One of something extraordinary and wonderful.

Rating: TV-MA, animated gore, profanity

Cast: The voices of Helena Bonham Carter, Matthew Goode, Susan Wokoma, Jarvis Cocker, Will Sharpe, Paul Kaye, Mia Goth and Miranda Richardson.

Credits: Directed by Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth van Bahr and Paloma Baeza, scripted by Edna Walsh. A Nexus Studios film for Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38 (a tale told in three chapters of @:33 minutes each.

“I’m Not in Love” is a forlorn, lovelorn and woebegone romantic comedy has little interest in going for laughs, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Here, there’s just not enough heart or story to make up the shortfall that the viewer feels, first scene to last.

The director and writers of 2006’s “Someone Else” return to the basic plot of that rom-com — a commitment-phobic guy has his moment of truth — and have no better luck this time round.

Al Weaver of Brit TV’s “Grantchester” and “Press” stars as Rob, a lad with lifelong issues with women, which we’re meant to gather was caused when his Dad left him when he ditched his “unstable” Mum.

“I don’t WANT to stay with Mum.”

“No one does.”

Thirty years later, Rob is three years into a live-in relationship with Marta (Cristina Catalina), unwilling or unable to commit, even though we can see that they have little in common.

She prays before going to sleep. He’s an atheist. She’s 38 and ready for marriage, or at least a baby. He’s not.

“Maybe you’re just a nicer person than me,” London nutritionist Rob speculates.

“That’s what my friends tell me.”

She has her no-nonsense bestie Lena (Sinead Matthews), he has his “mates” — married Tony (John Henshaw) and Sunil (Sunil Patel), neither all that happy, and carefree womanizer Chris (Morgan Watkins). None of them are all that much help, with Chris and Lena filling the bill of “toxic to the relationship” sounding boards.

With Rob mooning over one who got away, and others who Chris tries to set him up with, or much younger women who throw themselves at him, this looks like “hard times for lovers,” as the old song goes.

Co-writers Radha Chakraborty and Col Spector (he also directed it) seem as undecided about Rob as he is about settling down. Is he fundamentally decent, a heel or just “damaged?” Meeting his mother (Tessa Peake-Jones), we’re expected to lean towards the latter. I mean, he’s almost 40 and his self-involved mother refuses to remember or accept his lifelong nut allergy, to the point where she’s literally and thoughtlessly shoving a forkful of Waldorf Salad in his face.

Marta comes off as passive until it’s almost too late for her to speak up for herself.

And chinless, stubble-bearded, wimpy and indecisive Rob having women all but lining up for him is a British twist on the male wish-fulfillment fantasy that has to be seen to be disbelieved.

As undecided as the filmmakers are, Weaver doesn’t do enough to tip the scales towards “Let’s root for this bloke.”

So we’ve left with an indecisive movie about an indecisive leading man, a movie I’ll spare you from by saying decide to skip it. Kind of wish I had.

Rating: unrated, some profanity, sexual situations

Cast: Al Weaver, Cristina Catalina, Morgan Watkins, Tessa Peake-Jones, Sinead Matthews

Credits: Directed by Col Spector, scripted by Radha Chakraborty and Col Spector. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:24

Get all teary-eyed, if you must. And not out of sympathy for the gratuitous crotch shots, either.

Feb. 4.

Dark, twisted and a tad bizarre, the film adaptation of the French farce “Dear Mother” goes places no Hollywood production would dare.

Any movie whose entire later acts concern the efforts of her self-absorbed son, his wife and his veterinarian best friend to get a snapshot of that son’s 80 year-old mother’s vagina is going to be “out there,” and Laurent Lafitte‘s film is that.

This Around the World With Netflix production, the directing debut of star Lafitte (“Elle,” “Tell No One”), whom the credits make sure to remind us is a member of the legendary “Comedie francaise,” may be uneven and a little sluggish out of the gate, with some of the silly simply not translating or not coming across. But you will laugh, if only occasionally. There’s no denying that.

Lafitte plays Jean-Louis, an attorney in a brittle, “Do you still love me?” marriage with Valerie (Karin Viard) that leaves him unsatisfied and lost.

No, that transvestite hooker in the park who he bumps into, says “I don’t think that’s my…style” (in French with English subtitles) is no help.

Then something happens at the gym, on the exercise treadmill. He’s not seeing his pulse register there. His pal Michel (Vincent Macaigne), a veterinarian, wants to rush him to the hospital — after stumbling through his animal medical bag for something that will let him hear his friend’s heartbeat.

“You heart isn’t beatiing.”

“Is it SERIOUS?”

“It’s…worrying.”

But Valerie, noting that her husband is ambulatory, thinks a visit to her “holistic guru and life coach,” Margaux (Nicole Garcia) is in order. Margaux SEES things, senses them.

“You life is in a python’s belly,” she says, getting to the “heart” of the matter. “How can the python throw you up?”

He’s got mommy issues, she figures. And to get his heart to beat again, he’s got to resolve those…and fetch Margaux a photo of Mom’s genitals. That entails a lot of kvetching, a lot of lies, trickery and begging. First and foremost, though, Jean-Louis has to visit the seemingly sweet little old lady (Hélène Vincent) he hasn’t seen or even talked to on the phone for four years.

Working from a script adapted by actor/playwright Sébastien Thiery from his own play, Lafitte swings and misses at more laughs than he should, considering the whole “Comedie francaise” connection. Jean-Louis keeps referring to his unhappy life as “a farce.” But farce’s are quick, and “Dear Mother” is not.

The set-ups for big laughs are laboriously spoiled by the slack pacing. But as the lies pile up and the veterinarian’s efforts to “just get a smear” from Brigitte, and she doesn’t fall for the “Neighbor’s Day” stunt (everybody walks around nude, hoping Mom will join on), well, we didn’t bring that Polaroid for nothing.

“I’ve always loved you, Brigitte.”

The unexpected laughs are what worked for me, though perhaps others will find more mirth in the droll, deadpan and not-quite-kinky set-ups — the dream sequences in which Jean-Louis imagines himself reeling in his mother by their shared umbilical cord, for instance.

Comedy is the most subjective genre, and to each her or his own. “Dear Mother” didn’t quite get there for me. But if you give it a try, you must stick with it through the credits. Polaroid snaps take a full minute to develop, remember?

Rating: TV-MA, sex, full frontal nudity, etc.

Cast: Laurent Lafitte, Karin Viard, Vincent Macaigne, Hélène Vincent and Nicole Garcia

Credits: Directed by Laurent Lafitte, scripted by Sébastien Thiery, based on his play. A StudioCanal film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:38