Russian Dolls

"Women are all stupid bitches and I am an asshole,” cries a self-deprecating Romain Duris. Yep, that sounds about right.
Having scored an arthouse goal with Pot Luck, director Cédric Klapish has reunited the same incredibly annoying characters for this equally sophomoric sequel. For the occasion, the brashly cosmopolitan sophisticates of the original film, lately co-occupants of an apartment in Barcelona and now fast approaching 30, can be seen hooking up around European hot-spots (London, Paris, St. Petersburg), not always but mostly between the sheets.
With their devil-may-care student days behind them, the crew have moved on to contemplation of the compromises of adult employment. Like, huh? Audrey Tautou spends her time at exotic rallies staged against ‘the vagaries of globalisation’, Romain Duris gets to ghost write autobiographies for incredibly amorous supermodels and one half of the token lesbian coven (De France) is the Parisian Lorraine Keane. Boo-hoo. Being a grown up really sucks.
Only reformed lout William (Kevin Bishop), enfeebled by love for his Russian ballerina bride-to-be, displays any symptoms of maturity or a related ability to keep one’s dick in one’s pants. Our hero Romain Duris, by contrast, has a pouting girl in every port. Soon enough, the entire film starts to feel like some guy recounting the bedpost notches – after Audrey Tautou, there was the cute black girl from the Kookai shop, then the supermodel, then over to London to pay Kelly Reilly a visit. A sexy visit, as Zapp Brannigan might have it.
To be fair, a flurry of miniskirts, gallopingly presented, is far from the most painful viewing and Klapish’s restless style – replete with fantasy sequences, a playful chronology and flashy splitting screens – is never dreary. But the creeping dread remains. Will Pot Luck eventually go Heimat? Please God, no. I’m done with these folks now, thank you very much.