Some american friends told me once that what makes a french movie is : a train scene, a love scene, some T&A in an arty way, a sex scene, a quarrel scene and some candid stuff about Paris bein' THE most romantic place on earth.

No doubt, MA FEMME EST UNE ACTRICE is a french movie. You got it all here. Does that make a good movie? No.

The director, Yvan Attal, is also the lead here. He's married in real life with Charlotte Gainsbourg who is also...his wife in this movie. As he's also the screenwriter, he decided to keep their first names to tell the story of a sports reporter married to a beautiful & successful actress. What seems to be a good idea in the beginning ends up in a dead end. You just stick with his idea all along and nothing else happens. He's just jealous of what may happen off set with some other actor ( the great Terence Stamp, the only one being professional around here). And...that's about it.

Yvan Attal is over-acting (and this is beyond cliché) the jerky jewish jealous husband. His sister (director-turns-actress Noemie Lvovsky) is doing the same job as the pregnant wife (married to a catholic) who hysterically wants her soon-to-be-born son to be circumsized. Only their parents seem to be well balanced.

It looks like a french imitation of Woody Allen's works (a la Radio Days)or, for the worst, Neil Simon's, but with no talent shown, no rhythm, except for Charlotte Gainsbourg luminous interpretation : she's the real asset here. If you add a few homophobic lines, some more clichés about Arabs who are unable to talk except with their fists, blondes who look like Vampire Vixens from Venus with no brains at all...you'll get a boring movie about an actor speaking about what is life being married to a gorgeous actress.

It may have been an interesting premise : actors speaking about their life...as actors... it's just another french flick, pompous and pretentious filled with clichés. It brings nothing new to what you may think about the actors world : you may adore them but they're just like everybody else. Thrilling, huh?

I'll make up a new genre especially for that movie : the Uncomedy.

Superwonderscope says: 2

Charlotte Gainsbourg has starred in `The Little Thief' in French and `The Cement Garden' in English and in about 26 other movies. She's been in films at least since she was thirteen, so it seems surprising she's only 31. Her parents were Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, both French cinema and pop culture icons. In this movie with the straightforward title, `My Wife Is an Actress,' her longtime companion and the father of their child, Yvan Attal, directs her and plays her husband in a story about an actress named Charlotte (who's famous) and her sports writer husband named Yvan (who's not), and the problems he has with this simple fact: she's a movie star; he's not.

It might have been more truthful to call the movie `My Wife Is More Famous Than I Am,' because Yvan Attal isn't an unknown sports writer; he's a movie actor too, and he's been in 23 movies himself, including the excellent `Love Without Pity' (`Un monde sans pitié, 1989), directed by Eric Rochant. He's just not as famous as Charlotte, and this is the first full-length film he's directed. What's it like to be constantly reminded that your wife is more popular and better known at the same thing that you do? That might be a more interesting subject, if less suitable for light romantic comedy, which is what `Ma femme est une actrice' aims to be. Yvan Attal has cast himself as a kind of everyman, a little guy.

Regardless of your occupation, you might be jealous, if your wife were making out with actors in front of the camera all the time. That's what gets through to Yvan – the movie Yvan -- when an annoying fellow introduced to him at a bar by his tiresome obsessively Jewish sister, Nathalie (Noémie Lvovsky) keeps harping on the issue. If Ivan had cast himself as an actor, he might be more understanding; and in the movie, he takes acting lessons to gain more sympathy for Charlotte's career. His success auditioning as a flower bursting into bloom leads him into a little affair with a young aspiring actress – but the affair doesn't bloom; it just leads to a misunderstanding with Charlotte.

The base line feeling the movie deals with -- annoyance at having a famous movie star wife -- comes though strongest in the early scenes when Charlotte and Yvan are going around Paris and she's constantly being asked for her autograph -- and he's not. It isn't good for his ego that while he can't reserve a table before midnight at a restaurant, if she comes on the phone there's one ready at nine.

The jealousy Yvan feels about Charlotte's playing nude love scenes is a concern that goes deeper, but this is developed indirectly, by having Charlotte get bothered by the idea herself after talking to Yvan, then making a fuss about it at Pinewood Studios in England, leading to a colorful scene. While the London film is being shot, Yvan keeps going back and forth on the train to visit her. This is where his `sports writer' role evaporates. He exists only as a jealous husband. Eventually he has an encounter with his wife's British costar, an older actor with sex appeal -- "John" – Terrence Stamp. Perhaps there is nothing more in danger of seeming inauthentic, or more difficult to make interesting, than essentially playing yourself, as Gainsbourg and Stamp, and to a lesser extent Attal, are doing here.

I remembered Charlotte Gainsbourg as a spoiled, pouting creature, and was afraid I wouldn't want to see her as herself. In fact she's charming, light as air, always conveying the impression of the smooth professional, and it's fascinating to watch somebody who can act as fluently in English as she can in French. It's an extra attraction to see Terence Stamp playing an aging English actor. But he's so laid back about his courtship of Charlotte that all the energy goes out of the scenes he's in.

Nathalie, the ultra-Jewish sister, becomes the movie's biggest annoyance. She seems to be present to make us aware of the fact that Yvan's Jewish (Attal was born in Tel Aviv), a fact that has nothing to do with his character. Nathalie has a `goy' husband and she's pregnant. They are constantly arguing about whether the husband should get circumcised and the baby, if a boy, should be. A tired enough issue, made more so by its constant repetition. This running unfunny joke is made even less funny by the fact that Nathalie, the pregnant woman, always has a cigarette in her hand or in her mouth, and continues to smoke like a chimney even with the newborn baby in the room. Another annoyance of this movie is that it contains some homophobic and anti-Arab remarks, and they're not ironic, they're just there.

The tousled haired Yvan is appealing enough to arouse sympathy for his plight – at first. His character has only one note, sung over and over. The movie lasts only 95 minutes, but seems about 35 minutes too long.

`My Wife Is an Actress' begins well and deserves credit for approaching its topic head-on, without any dodges other than Yvan's becoming a `sports writer' rather than a less famous actor. The problem is attacked persistently, but there's no solution found. One ends with the feeling that this was a kind of therapy for Yvan Attal. He does get pretty close to his subject. Perhaps he was too close to it already. If he'd gotten any closer, things might have gotten nasty.

The readers' reactions to this film were not what I expected-- most seem to be*spoilers*, but I think they, for the most part, have missed the point. This is a multi-lingual farce that shows the director/writer Yvan Attal to have wit and wonder. Those who do not like it are taking it too much at face value and have not tuned in to the very underhanded sense of humor that propels the rhythm of this comedy. Every romance between two talented people is bound to experience this kind of mutual jealousy and mistrust, as part of the growth in a relationship. If they don't, they are kidding themselves. In order to make the film, Attal obviously had to have the "consent" of all the adults in it, and he had to discuss the danger factors as he pried open his more naive characters, himself included. Some of the viewers saw him as a lout. I think Attal must have gone through a kind of "self-analysis" as he made the film, and for a director to present himself as a lout is, after all, rather rare. Loutishness is just one side of a personality that the love relationship brings out. All of these ups and downs are presented on a plate, as in a delicious "tasting meal" one can savor at a chef-driven restaurant. Not everyone will like all the little morsels, but all of them represent the chef's (Attal's) inner and outer struggle with himself (and his wife's) as part of the acting and film industry and being a "talent."

A couple of my favorite scenes: 1) his parody of the acting studio as he demonstrates a flower opening; 2) his seeing himself in multiple after he finds out that Charlotte is pregnant (in this age of cloning, how wittier can you get with this image!?);3) his demonstration of "l'amour fou" as he races back and forth on the train through the Chunnel to be with his beloved only to be squelched at the other end.

I also was not at all offended by the secondary plot of his sister and her baby. Many young couples constantly grouse at each other as part of their communicating style -- he and his sister as siblings demonstrate their familiarity by biting at each other like cubs. It may not be very pleasant for bystanders, but, in fact, it is very real human behavior, just not part of the iced-cake sibling relationships depicted by Hollywood.

I started to watch this film with no expectations, and came away totally delighted, having thought that romantic comedies could no longer be found in film.

Of five stars, I would give it **** four and look forward to more of his films. I wouldn't worry about their marriage!

Director/writer/co-star Yvan Attal is actually married to co-star Charlotte Gainsbourg, an effervescent and shimmering bilingual (French/English) beauty. And they both can act.

This is a comedy with a dark but non-violent edge. Gainsbourg plays "Charlotte," a star of both French and English films who graciously dispenses autographs left and right and during dinner at restaurants. Attal plays "Yvan," a doting but increasingly disturbed sportscaster who wears down dealing with his wife's intrusive fans and, more critically, his mounting fears that she is having it off with her aging but still presumably babe-magnet co-star in a London studio filming, "John" (Terence Stamp)

Yvan apparently is underutilized at work because he has the time to brood deeply and split to London whenever his antagonistic feelings of longing for and suspicion of his spouse surface (which they do increasingly).

Stamp gives a delightful portrayal of an old actor whose wife doesn't understand him but he's straddling the pursuit of Charlotte with the subtle reality that he's getting a bit old for that sort of thing. Stamp brings a bemused actor's attempts at dalliance to life.

There's an extraneous sub-plot in which Yvan's sister, seriously Jewish, belabors her non-Jewish husband to agree to be circumcised as they await the birth of their first child. This irrelevant and uninteresting side story at least stretches the film out to a barely respectable 93 minutes, justifying the $10 admission.

There are amusing scenes, the best being when Charlotte negotiates with her frenetic director for terms on which to appear naked in a scene. The resolution is both predictable and hilarious.

While few of us have mates or lovers who are in the public eye as Charlotte is, Yvan's increasing jealousy will strike a familiar chord with many viewers. In real life happy endings to episodes of mounting distrust, approaching paranoia, are few.

A good, enjoyable film. But now I'm wondering about the real life marriage of Yvan and Charlotte.