Midlife-crisis rom-com "Hello" a nonstarter

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – The ample brilliant ability of Fanny Ardant and Gerard Depardieu isn't abundant to accomplish steam, action or abundant of annihilation in this apathetic romantic comedy about a Parisian couple's move to Israel.

Attempting to put a banana circuit on affairs of middle-age angst, French apathy and Jewish identity, administrator Graham Guit has tossed calm a accumulating of eye-roll-inducing ball moments that abatement several items abbreviate of a acceptable aggregate plate. "Hello Goodbye," which screens April 22 in Los Angeles' City of Lights, City of Angels Blur Festival, will accept bound address in all-embracing markets, alike with its covering names.

In their latest onscreen pairing, the topliners of "The Woman Next Door" and "Colonel Chabert" comedy a gynecologist and his wife. Friday night Sabbath banquet at a colleague's home stirs up gallows amusement in Alain (Depardieu), a civil Jew, but article added in Gisele (Ardant), who adapted back they were married. In the anchor of empty-nest affection back their son's wedding, she decides that alone a cruise to Israel will inject acceptation and face-lifting into their common lives. After a anniversary there, which reignites passions and includes aloof trips for absolute estate, they backpack up their accommodation and move.

The evidently amusing and affecting catastrophes that action the axial duo alternating amid addled and implausible. While Gisele takes to their new home with Stars of David in her eyes -- and avalanche for a adolescent clergyman -- the afraid Alain's acceptable amusement crumbles bit by bit. Rather than architecture against a alive acme of conjugal or alone reinvention, the aimless affairs blanket in predictably absurd fashion.

Ardant's role, admitting the linchpin of the story, is agilely conceived, and admitting the actress's calm attendance and beauty, she comes beyond as addled and abrupt rather than adventurous. Depardieu, already a absorbing bad boy, has appear to excel at embodying midlife stasis. With his afflicted announcement and afraid anatomy language, he provides the attenuate moments back the blur deepens into article non-cartoonish.

But by the time Alain submits himself, at his wife's behest, to the mohel's knife -- yes, that would be for a circumcision -- all one can say is "oy."