The ruinous allure of fame, beauty

“Look at Me” does so many things so well, it’s difficult to know where to begin.

Is this new French film most impressive for its sharp and incisive writing? For acting that crackles with intelligence and skill? For directing that is energetic and engaged? Or for the impressive fact that the same two people have a hand in all those good things?

That would be the husband-and-wife team of Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri. Veteran actors dissatisfied with the parts they were offered, they first wrote a series of bitingly funny films for themselves to star in and people like Alain Resnais and Cedric Klapisch to direct.

Then, starting with 1999’s marvelous “The Taste of Others,” Jaoui began to direct as well. “Look at Me,” which once again stars both writers, is her latest film, the admired winner of the best screenplay award at Cannes, a smart and tartly entertaining enterprise that is a tiptop character study and a whole lot more.

For “Look at Me” (“Comme Une Image” is the French title) not only displays a formidable gift for creating characters and involving us in their stories, it also has points to make, ideas it wants us to consider about the world and the way it tends to function.

As both the English and French titles indicate, “Look at Me’s” target is how obsessed with the surface of things our society has become; how concerned with physical appearance and, more dangerously, with celebrity it has become fashionable to be.

With pointed and acerbic charm, “Look at Me” shows us the unmistakable ways success can mar the human equation. With devilish humor it illustrates how the pursuit and worship of fame and beauty confuse, change and derange everything they touch, ruining relationships and instigating bad behavior. This may be a French film, but its connection to Hollywood, at least by implication, is unmistakable.

Although “Look at Me” has multiple characters, it centers on a pair of protagonists, a famous and famously curmudgeonly father and the defiantly overweight daughter he has no patience for. These deeply frustrated family members are united by more than their relationship. They invariably exasperate each other and everyone they come into contact with.

The father is a celebrated writer in a country where writers are truly celebrities. But Etienne Cassard (co-writer Bacri) is as well-known for his nonstop abrasive arrogance as his ability. Scowling and foul-tempered, as likely to eviscerate as look at you, the great man’s idea of parenting is yelling “turn the volume down on the kid” to his young trophy wife, Karine (Virginie Desarnauts). Played with reckless brio and energetic self-absorption by Bacri, Etienne is forgiven for everything because of his fame, but the person he can abide least is the twentysomething daughter from his first marriage, the unfortunately named Lolita.

Perfectly played by Marilou Berry, the daughter of actress- director Josiane Balasko, Lolita is overweight by conventional standards and not happy about it. It fuels her father’s bottomless disdain as well as her own complex, roller-coaster emotions.

The kind of hesitant person who can’t face down a cab driver and has trouble getting into a party celebrating her own father, Lolita alternates between being browbeaten and lashing out in sullen irritability at her own timidity. “I’m not mad at my dad,” runs a typically savage comment, “I’d just like to kill him.”

In one of the film’s shrewd plot strands, Lolita’s career of choice -- though she typically can’t get her father to pay attention to it -- is classical singing, and the ethereal, transporting beauty of vocal music by Handel, Schubert, Mozart, Monteverdi and others contrasts pointedly with the grubbiness and meanness of life on Earth.

One of the themes of “Look at Me” is that Etienne’s celebrity is so powerful it has a field-disturbing effect, causing changes in behavior not only in his daughter but in everyone he comes into contact with -- or, looked at another way, infects.

These people include Sylvia, (writer-director Jaoui), Lolita’s no-nonsense voice teacher whose weak spot is an admiration for Etienne’s work. Then there is Sylvia’s husband, Pierre (Laurent Grevill), a not-particularly-successful novelist who claims to be above it all. Finally, there is Sebastien (Keine Bouhiza), a young man with identity issues. He is attracted to Lolita, but she is too wrapped up in her needs and her fury to notice. Celebrity touches all of them, and the results are not pretty.

The extent of Lolita’s fury is one of “Look at Me’s” shrewdest judgments. No one has more genuine reason to be angry, but her unhappiness has not made this young woman saintly or resigned but rather is threatening to turn her into a monster disturbingly like the father who blighted her life.

What makes “Look at Me” such a deeply satisfying experience is its ability to combine insightful character portraits like this with wickedly funny situations that slyly skewer all-too-human weaknesses. It’s no wonder Jaoui and Bacri in their pre-writing days never came across films with these qualities. There simply aren’t any others around.

*

‘Look at Me’

MPAA rating: PG-13 for brief language and a sexual reference

Times guidelines: Adult subject matter

Marilou Berry...Lolita Cassard

Agnes Jaoui...Sylvia Miller

Jean-Pierre Bacri...Etienne Cassard

Laurent Grevill...Pierre Miller

Virginie Desarnauts...Karine

A Sony Pictures Classics release. Director Agnes Jaoui. Producers Jean-Philippe Andraca, Christian Berard. Screenplay by Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri. Director of photography Stephane Fontaine. Editor Francois Migier. Costume designer Jackie Budin. Music Philippe Rombi. Production designer Olivier Jacquet. One hour, 50 minutes. In French with English subtitles.

In limited release.