Review by Marty Mapes

After making several films with inscrutable, psychologically damaged characters, Jean-Jacques Beineix directed a surprisingly straightforward film in Roselyne and the Lions.

Roselyne is the title character, but the movie opens on Serrurier clowning in class and doing poorly in his studies. Before long he's volunteering at a chintzy zoo in Marseilles where a pretty young lion-tamer-in-training catches his eye. He signs up as the only other student in lion-tamer school, and they grow together. Their teacher, Frazier (Gabriel Monnet), is a gruff and stout man, and he gives them the stern and sturdy advice they'll need later on.

They work their way up to the biggest circus in Europe, in Berlin, where they prepare for their big debut. They work harder than ever before with professional colleagues like Klint (who looks as though he might have once been an East German intelligence officer) who runs the tiger show. The finale is a grand piece of circus art, at once classy and kitschy. It's what the protagonists were striving for the whole three-hour movie. There are a few surprises at the finale, but only in the style, not in the dramatic arc.

After Beineix's more cryptic films, one might reasonably ask if there is something going on beneath the surface of Roselyne and the Lions. I think not. I think it's a straightforward story about the shape of an artistic career. At one point in Berlin, a local reporter interviews Roselyne about their new act. To him, the appeal of lion taming is obvious: it's a half-dressed woman with a whip and a crop, in a cage, dominating. But Beineix plays it very straight. Maybe lion taming is a strange enough profession that you don't need to build a gratuitously twisted story around it.

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