Too Beautiful For You, Trop belle pour toi, is a terribly very French film with Gérard Depardieu. Depardieu’s character, Bernard Barthélémy, is wealthy, has a gorgeous young wife, kids and a palatial home. Even so, he cannot resist his temp, a frumpy middle-aged women, played by Josiane Balasko as Colette Chevassu, with whom he quickly and irrevocably falls in love.
It is so French to have a man with “all the gifts of heaven” fall for another, especially since she possesses nothing that is valued in a woman, either in France, Hollywood, or even in general, in popular culture all around the modern world: she is not beautiful, she is not thin, she is not poised, she is not young, and she is not wealthy.
The the beautiful Florence Barthélémy, Bernard’s wife, storms into the hotel room wherein he finds Collette, the lover, and shouts, “you are a woman of no apparent charm” — where charm is strictly defined as being without those above-mentioned things.
What she doesn’t know is that in pursuing beauty, she has abandoned what Bernard really needed, which is connection, touch, attention, and adoration from a woman who is happy to be a wonderful lover and a lover of men — someone who is gentle, poetic and kind.
One surely cannot buy that at the Salon or at the Plastic Surgeon. The only thing is that, being French, all they ever do is allow the camera to mock her and all they do in the script is incessantly refer to her, Collette, as being plain, dull, and without charm.
