Stephan. Stephanie. The two are clearly meant to be together.

Stephan has a wildly powerful imagination with which he crafts his daily life. He finds himself in a horribly boring job after moving back to France and has nothing better to do than lie in bed and dream about his Disastrologie (a personal art project) and all the girls he mingles with in his daily life. This works well enough for him until he starts developing a crush on his next-door neighbor, Stephanie. They meet when he injures his hand against her piano during a moving accident that combines the worst of European workers and European stairs. She and her friend kid around with the poor Spanish boy who grew up in Mexico, and for some reason Stephan dreams of Stephanie. His dreams tend to get him into trouble as he acts out some of the more troublesome scenes. Before he knows it, he’s sleepwalking to her door naked and shoving a garbled letter underneath.

[Now I must interrupt my summary to point out that I liked where this was going. The first half of this flick struck me as an interesting romantic comedy that was taking itself in an original direction. But soon my worst fears began to be realized.]

The trouble doesn’t stop there. Stephan is actually a deeply disturbed individual with no semblance of a grasp on reality. He ceases to be cute with his daydreams and starts wrecking his life because he is an annoying little ball of insecurity who can’t identify whether he is awake or asleep at any given moment, no matter how hard he tries. Soon he must face the fact that he is crafting his own nightmare and must trust in love if he ever expects to receive it from Stephanie.

That doesn’t sound so bad, huh? Sounds like a worthwhile movie? I prettied it up for you. Stephan tends to amount to nothing but a crying little weenie of a man who doesn’t like work and can’t keep his cool around the ladies. He has a milky white conception of pure love that he can’t reconcile with his repressed sexual desires. He captivates Stephanie as she shares his bouts of imaginative romance, but he repels her with his phantasmal evidence of infidelity. He wants very dearly to be with Stephanie but cannot present any positive (or mature) quality about himself. It reminded me of being 15 all over again, except with some French sprinkled in. Oh, fuck! I took French through high school! Somebody plagiarized my early teenage years (and they are not worth watching)!

I tend to be forgiving when movies have poor beginnings but great endings. The converse of that will not be true. This movie has a wonderful beginning, but peters out in the end as Stephan falls deeper into insecurity and insanity. Worse, it gives the message that it’s okay for boys to be emotionally insecure and/or unstable because there is someone out there who will love you despite that. (They’re called mothers.) Stephan has obstacles in his relationship with his mother and takes his problems over to Stephanie, who supposedly cures him just by loving him through his emotional jack-assedness. Gimme a break.

But you know what? I can’t speak for everyone. I overheard someone from the screening say that he had just seen the best movie ever. Excepting the hyperbole, that might have been true for him. If you want to see a movie about the emotional boy getting the girl, this was made for you. It delivers on some really good office comedy too. Try this on for size:

Guy: “That’s the strangest thing… Why do my armpits smell like sperm?”

Guy [a French name, FYI] rubs Serge’s face into his armpit. Serge runs over to the manager and screams.

Serge: “Guy is making me smell like sperm!”

—Duncan Wright