Beautiful Lies/De Vrais Mensonges

Directed by Pierre Salvadori.Starring Audrey Tautou, Nathalie Baye, Sami Bouajila, Stephanie Lagarde, Judith Chemla, Cecile Boland, Didier Brice 12A cert, lim release, 104 min

OH, SPARE US. Some maniac has decided that Audrey Tautou is one of the few French stars who can draw anglophone audiences to useless Gallic middle-brow entertainments. Why else would this tedious, repetitive romantic comedy be playing in commercial cinemas?

Lest we miss the point, the protagonist is forced to shoulder an eerily familiar first name. Emilie (Tautou) works as a hairdresser on some superficially attractive island. Too busy twitching her nose at the camera, she fails to notice that one employee (misused Sami Bouajila) has a desperate – and frankly inexplicable – crush on her.

When an anonymous love letter arrives, Emilie decides to redirect the missive towards her sex-starved mother (Nathalie Baye).

Over the following, crawling hour and a half, various misunderstandings drive the audience to thoughts of soft pillows and warm eiderdowns.

Pondering the archaic nature of the plot (all those misdirected letters) this writer became convinced that the piece must be based on some mercifully neglected 18th-century farce. One half expected a jester dressed as a bear to turn up at any moment.

Pierre Salvadori, the writer and director, has no such excuse. The piece is, in this sense at least, an original work and – his co-writer aside – Salvadori has nobody else to blame for the casual sexism, disgusting ageism and conspicuous disregard for structure.

What's the French for ordure? It's ordure, apparently.