My Wife Is an Actress

Imagine being married to a movie actress. She's always off somewhere being embraced by the entire world while you sit at home and wonder whether she's making it with her leading man. Or so it would seem from watching Yvan Attal's My Wife Is an Actress, which stars Attal himself as the most crazily jealous husband since Othello inquired into the whereabouts of Desdemona's handkerchief. Set in both Paris and London, this bilingual romantic comedy does nice little riffs on the old real life/reel life theme, what with Attal playing a guy named Yvan and his wife, French movie star Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing Yvan's wife, a French movie star named Charlotte. Attal claims the movie isn't autobiographical, and one hopes, for his sake, that it isn't. The movie's Yvan, a sportswriter, can't let his wife out of his sight without suspecting her of infidelity. And yet, like Desdemona, she seems as faithful as can be. Gainsbourg may not have quite the va-va-voom to send the average man into the clutches of the green-eyed monster, but Yvan is clearly not the average man. And My Wife Is an Actress, thanks in part to some delirious camerawork, isn't the average romantic comedy. At once painful and pleasurable to watch, it's a loving, crazy ode to l'amour fou.