See You Monday!

(Maurice Dugowson, 1979)
Certainly more honest and engaging than your average soap opera, in part because it argues for female bonding over romantic escapism, in part because the females in question are Carole Laure and Miou-Miou, who are appealing and sympathetic as well as drop dead gorgeous. It's a pleasure to watch them pal around as they struggle with their exceedingly first-world problems, especially because the French co-production details their dilemmas with some cinematic sense and wit. Like any soap opera, though, this movie absolutely clobbers its central dramatic crisis, as Miou-Miou traipses off to domestic boredom with David Birney's preoccupied clod of a Tampa doctor, while Laure gets something going with Claude Brasseur, a shifty travelling salesman in the ugly-older-guy tradition of French love interests. Anybody in the audience can see through these bozos from the minute they show up, and it discredits the women in this movie that they can't do the same, dallying interminably in their respective kept woman/nervous breakdown dilemmas. Imagine how much more credible and rewarding it would have been to just watch these two women keep on hanging around, trying and failing, getting on with their lives, instead of laying on the hard-sell melodrama. It might even have transcended soap opera.