Tip Top

At Lincoln Center’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Writer/Director Serge Bozon’s Tip Top, starring Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Kiberlain and François Damiens is a fun and funny film, when the three are on screen.  They play wacked out cops with weird and hilarious foibles both sexual and otherwise.

However, when they’re not on screen, the film fails big time.  The plot is incomprehensible and a huge bore, causing audible yawns throughout the audience. 

Bozon should have studied the TV drama NCIS to understand how to pull this off, correctly.  On that show, the audience tunes in, not for the plot, but to watch the main characters interact with each other. The weekly plot, though secondary, is, nevertheless, interesting or, at least, comprehensible and comes to a satisfying resolution.  Here, the plot is incomprehensible until near the end, but, by that time, we don’t care and it is incomplete, anyway.

Bozon is energetic and was trying to show off what he thinks was a breakthrough political storyline, but we didn’t care.  Only the interaction of his main characters was of interest, when they were the focus.

The film would be better, if he left out the story and just kept the scenes where his actors went wild.

I give Tip Top a 3 out of 5 for the wonderful work of Huppert, Kiberlain and Damiens.