The Americanized title of Agnès Jaoui’s Parlez-moi De La Pluie doesn’t match up with a literal translation—“talk to me of the rain”—but marketers can’t be blamed for trying to infuse a hint of action into a movie that boils down to a series of tart conversations. Jaoui and her husband Jean-Pierre Bacri (with whom she traditionally co-writes and co-stars), specialize in barbed comedies of haute bourgeois manners; they wrote Smoking/No Smoking and Same Old Song for Alain Resnais before stepping out on their own with 2000’s The Taste Of Others. In Let It Rain, Jaoui plays a feminist author turned political dark horse thanks to France’s gender-parity laws, and Bacri is a brusque telejournalist hoping to trade up by making a documentary about her. The son of Jaoui’s family’s maid and an apprentice editor who learned his trade under Bacri, Jamel Debbouze (Amélie) connects the two, and outpaces them at nearly every step.
