With 'Look at Me,' French director has everyone looking at her

Americans may be crazed lately with the notion that all French women are thin, but director Agnes Jaoui could set them straight with her latest film, ''Look at Me," which opened in Boston on Friday. Her heroine is a 20-year-old Parisian whose caloric intake isn't restricted to cigarettes and coffee. Instead, Lolita is a plump figure who dresses in oversized sweaters and loose peasant dresses -- her famous novelist father distressingly calls her ''his big girl."

Jaoui (pronounced Zhou-wee) hasn't read the now-mythic diet tome, nor does she intend to. ''I put another title on that book: All women in the world are crazy," she says by phone from Paris. ''No woman is normal or sane when she is talking about her own body."

Despite the seeming connection, Jaoui didn't intend this film to spark a debate about the body image of her fellow countrywomen. Her goal was to explore the difficult relationship between this young woman, played by Marilou Berry, and her father, played by Jean-Pierre Bacri, which is complicated by the fact that her mother left them long ago and he has remarried a woman who isn't much older than his daughter.

Like her previous directorial effort, ''The Taste of Others," and her myriad screenplays and theater productions that have been staged over the last dozen years, Jaoui is out to explore emotional relationships among disparate groups of people. Whether dealing with literary society or drug-dealing barmaids, she turns her characters loose in Paris and watches how they behave.

The effect has been miraculous so far. Even though ''Look at Me" (the French title is ''Comme un Image") is only technically 40-year-old Jaoui's second directorial effort, she's already being hailed as a master director. She has won handfuls of French awards for her work, and ''The Taste of Others" was a 2001 Academy Award nominee for best foreign film. ''Look at Me" won the screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival in May and was selected as the opening night film at September's New York Film Festival, a spot usually reserved for a seasoned veteran.

''It was kind of our way to stand behind somebody we think has become a major talent," says Richard Pena, director of the New York Film Festival. ''Her work is funny and humane and has all the qualities we love. Selecting it was our way of signaling we think this is somebody who has become a major figure."

When you consider that Jaoui has been working toward this designation since she was 11, it seems more rational for her to be considered in such high regard. She was inspired to the artistic life at that young age by reading ''The Diary of Anne Frank," but unlike most journal-obsessed preteen girls, she was less concerned about expressing her feelings than she was at leaving behind something for posterity. ''Unconsciously, maybe, I thought if I was famous, I would not die completely," she says.

Jaoui's parents encouraged her pursuits and she started singing and acting in stage productions. ''My father above all, is a very original and special man," she says. ''They always told my brother and me that their own studies didn't help them make them who they are."

She met actor-writer Jean-Pierre Bacri about the time she was starting her journal, and later began collaborating with him on screenplays and plays. She won't define the rest of their relationship, even though she knows it leads to the confusion of their being variously described as married, divorced, lovers, or just partners. ''In France we don't speak about that, because it's our privacy. I'm actually absolutely unable to describe our relationship with one word," she says.

Her making the leap to director didn't break up the team. The pair co-wrote the scripts for ''The Taste of Others" and ''Look at Me," working for months on the scenario before starting on the dialogue. They both acted in the films, with Bacri, now 53, in the starring roles while Jaoui took on supporting parts.

''I would feel very bad putting myself in the first part, as if I was paying people to admire me," she says. ''I don't know if that's insecurity or modesty, but it wouldn't please me -- although I have main parts in the other movies with no problem."

For Jaoui, directing is a new sense of freedom. A crazy, distracted sort of freedom, but a good feeling nonetheless. ''To direct is to do a hundred jobs at the same time. And yet you are still putting forward one point of view. The challenge is not to lose sight of what you want to say," she says.

Women directors in America are struggling to get a foothold in Hollywood, but Jaoui didn't face many gender-related obstacles on her trajectory. In the last 10 years, the French movie industry has been open to women directors, as has Europe as a whole. The New York Film Festival, for instance, has honored two other European women with its opening night spot -- Agnes Varda and Agnieszka Holland -- but no American women.

''The French, somehow without much of a movement or a cause, suddenly created a generation where there are enormous numbers of women [directors]," says Pena.

Jaoui thinks that is because the system of production is different. ''At one moment, the cinema in France was not doing well," she says. ''There was no recipe to succeed, so producers said, 'Let's try women.' It was quite successful."

While some of her compatriots have taken their newfound success and turned it into big American movie contracts, Jaoui isn't enticed. ''Do I want to work in Hollywood? No, I want my freedom. I want to work with actors who understand my language."

However, she is OK with American actors coming to her. Her next project is a short film for the compilation ''Paris, je t'aime" in which she will direct Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands.

''When they proposed to me to work with these two actors," she says, ''I thought, that's a meeting I cannot miss."

Beth Pinsker can be reached at bpinsker@nyc.rr.com.