“La prunelle de mes yeux” (“The Apple of My Eye”), a film included in the Concorso Internazionale section in the 69th edition of Locarno Festival, is a love story that is different but not really, funny but not really, and enjoyable but not really.
The concept itself is interesting, but the film doesn’t make it justice. A man tries to seduce a blind woman by pretending to be blind too. However, after the first funny half, the film turns into a series of situations that are too unlikely to be taken seriously and not absurd enough to be funny. The speed at which the events occur is painfully slow, only to accelerate in the last 20 minutes with an extremely high number of ellipses, as though the director had noticed too late how long and boring her film had become.
Maybe the fault lies also in the high expectations the average moviegoer has when they go see a new French comedy, whose reputation has reached unexpected high levels thanks to films like “Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis” and “The Intouchables”. Nevertheless, even if this were a good film, it would be hard to understand why a film of this kind – maybe more suitable for the more mainstream Piazza Grande section – was selected to compete in the most important section of the festival.
In conclusion, “La prunelle de mes yeux” is not exactly a bad film; however, its simple story and mediocre cinematography make it more suitable for primetime television, when expectations are usually much lower than at one of Europe’s most important auteur film festivals.
