Movie review: ‘Let It Rain’

It means no disrespect to the talented French team of director Agnès Jaoui and her writing partner Jean-Pierre Bacri to say they started their film careers as actors and that their latest effort, “Let It Rain,” makes that fact evident.

For both this feature and its predecessors, “Look at Me” and the Oscar-nominated “The Taste of Others,” are characterized by splendid dialogue and rich, juicy roles for performers, Jaoui and Bacri first among them. A film that features exceptionally well-drawn characters and inspired moments if not necessarily a tightly focused plot, “Let It Rain” shows how well you can do if you have an exact sense of what good actors need to do their best.

A lacerating comedy of multiple errors that skewers everything in its path, this up-to-the-minute black farce is brought to life by Jaoui and Bacri’s lively sense of contemporary entanglements as well as their gimlet eye for how ridiculous relationships between people can be.

Not just any people, either, but grumpy, self-involved individuals who tend to be abrupt, abrasive and sarcastic in a way that can at times seem particularly French. It’s rare to find a character in this film who isn’t either aggrieved about something or feeling a powerful grudge against someone we’ve met in a previous scene.

“Everyone feels humiliated or, more exactly, a victim of injustice or discrimination,” Jaoui explains in the press notes. “The problem is that everyone thinks they’re more of a victim than the next person.”

It’s a tribute to the multiple skills of Jaoui and Bacri that the characters they play are the film’s most memorable, people who, rather to our surprise, eventually come to a more resolved place in their lives as they are humanized by the plot’s exaggerated events.

Writer-director Jaoui has given herself the role of Agathe, the character around whom everyone else revolves. A celebrated Paris-based writer and bestselling feminist author, Agathe is returning to spend 10 days in the Alpilles region of Provence, the area where she grew up, to run for political office.

Lying in wait for Agathe, as it were, are two very different men who see her return as a possible career opportunity. Leading the charge is documentary filmmaker Michel (Bacri), who wants to make a film about Agathe as part of a series on successful women.

He enlists a former student, Karim (Jamel Debbouze), to collaborate with him because Karim’s mother, Mimouna (Mimouna Hadji), has worked for Agathe’s family for decades and, in fact, still labors for Agathe’s insecure sister Florence (Pascale Arbillot), who continues to live in the old family home.

Because she knows Karim, Agathe commits to the documentary without really knowing what it entails, a decision she comes to regret more than once, as anything that can go wrong promptly does, often to great comic effect. Also falling apart are everyone’s personal relationships, with secret liaisons getting revealed and sub rosa emotional agendas rising to the surface.

Jaoui’s acting background has also enabled her to gather a strong and idiosyncratic cast. Debbouze, who starred in “Days of Glory” and is mostly known for his comic brio, is cast against type as the serious, even morose Karim, and Hadji, who plays his mother, is a nonprofessional whom Jaoui met because she was the housekeeper of a place the actor-director rented.

Not surprisingly, however, it’s Jaoui and Bacri who do “Let It Rain’s” most memorable work. She is excellent as a fiercely intelligent, high-strung and self-involved professional, while he is just as good if not better as a nominal professional who is in fact anything but, an egocentric screw-up who always feels the world is not giving him his due.

Good as it is moment to moment, “Let It Rain’s” serious side and its farce elements don’t always cohere, but that turns out to be an easy thing to overlook. When a film can so exactly capture something essential about human nature, it’s hard not to be captivated ourselves.

kenneth.turan@latimes.com