Stop Calling Me Baby! (1977)

Director: Éric Le Hung
Writer: Éric Le Hung, from a screenplay by Philippe Bougoin
Stars: Jodie Foster, Jean Yanne and Sydne Rome

Index: The First Thirty.

After five films in 1976, the year that firmly established Jodie Foster as an actress to watch, she promptly took on a different challenge: to make foreign films in foreign languages. There are a lot of things that can be said about Moi, fleur bleue and Casotto, many of them negative, but one positive is that they were completely unlike any of her previous movies.

Moi, fleur bleue is a French film but it appears in two versions, one English and one français. Rather than shooting in French and dubbing it into English later, it appears that they shot the film twice, once in each language, but with the exact same cast. Both Jean Yanne and Bernard Giraudeau were French but seem to be capable in English. Jodie Foster and Sydne Rome were American but fluent in French.

I managed to get hold of both versions, even though language became rather surreal. What I have is a French version subtitled in Spanish that I translated into English (though the first scene, not in the English version, was already in English) and an English version subtitled in Portuguese. Therefore it didn’t seem too weird when Max delivers an insult in German in the English language version of a French film that was hard subbed in Portuguese.

The two versions follow the same sweep but the French version is longer by ten minutes, it swaps scenes around and it generally makes a little more sense. Maybe more importantly, it also feels a little less creepy and that’s a good thing because creepy isn’t the first adjective a romantic comedy should conjure up.

At heart, it’s a coming of age story for Jodie Foster’s character, a schoolgirl named Isabelle Tristant, who’s nicknamed Rosebud in English but “fleur bleue” in French, which means blue flower. However, that coming of age includes a romance that becomes sexual. It feels odd for a few reasons to hear Foster utter a line like “I want a dick!” but especially so here when she’s playing a fifteen year old girl.

Foster was fourteen when she shot this but she’d been capably acting beyond her age for a while. If anything, she’d developed physically over the previous year so looked a little older than her role for a change. However, when she gets a boyfriend—Sylvester in English, Isidore in French—he’s a lot older than she is. Bernard Giraudeau was thirty, or over twice her age, an immediately obvious difference.

Then again, her screen sister, Sophie, is in a relationship with an older man too, albeit not quite so obviously: Sydne Rome was thirty-one and Jean Yanne was forty-four. However, that relationship passes the half plus seven test, so isn’t creepy. Sleeping with a fifteen year old is creepy, even if you’re not twice her age.

Oddly, that isn’t the creepiest scene here. At the beginning, in the English version, Max and Sophie walk past each other in the city square; when he turns round, she’s gone. So he hires a private detective to track her down, as you do. Once he knows who she is, he walks up to her in the square and asks “You want me?”

Fortunately, in the French version, it’s clear much sooner that he doesn’t hire a detective; he seeks the aid of a knowledgeable friend, i.e. Sylvester/Isidore. And when he first speaks to Sophie, he asks a more palatable, “Do you love me?” Her taking him to her place and jumping into bed with him seems a bit more believable with those caveats.

Foster does a good job here, even before we factor in that she’s delivering credible lines in a foreign language. The film relies on her most of all, because Isabelle has the most crucial arc of growth within the story, but she lives up to the challenge. It’s an edgy role and one where we would usually see her much older male co-star dominate, but she’s never not in charge of anything she does.

Frankly, while Giraudeau is all that the film asked him to be, it’s entirely fair that he not be credited alongside the three leads. Yanne, who plays Max, delivers a strong performance as a truck driver who’s found a woman who seems well out of his class, especially given his sexual appetite. It’s to his credit, and the script’s, that he grows as a character too, becoming a father figure quickly at a rather awkward time.

In another film, Rome would be the lead, as the elder sister who brings home the bacon in the absence of parents. She’s a model, and for once we can believe that because she has that certain something that’s needed beyond mere good looks, which she has too as a taller Kylie Minogue type. Her scene modelling naked in a freezing cold Côte d’Azur is a powerful one.

What I’ve described thus far is a decent film and there’s definitely one in here somewhere, albeit more obviously in the French version, a truer vision with a much better flow. I frankly struggled with the English version, because it shuffles scenes into a more troublesome order, adds voiceovers where they aren’t needed and overdoes the use of the theme, When I Looked at Your Face, in versions by both Jodie Foster and Scherrie Payne.

However, there are flaws that transcend the versions, not least the core story. Just because the English version is creepier than the French doesn’t stop that from being creepy too. That said, my favourite scene here may well be this fifteen year old girl standing in front of a class and being a little too honest in her assignment to talk about the best thing that happened on her vacation. That ends with her mooning the headmistress who now considers her a whore.

Beyond that, there are scenes I fail to grasp. There’s one where the core trio pick up a pair of tiny dachshund puppies, apparently only to show how deeply Max has become part of this family; it’s he who walks them and then cleans the floor of the bookshop after they pee on it, even though it’s Isabelle who wants them and names them Sodom and Gomorrah. However, it plays like it’s really about the Comtesse de Tocqueville and her pet chimp, Casimir, who’s practically attacked by dogs in her apartment until he craps on her. Why?

I asked why a lot while watching the English version and I didn’t find many answers while watching the French version. So much of this seems to revolve around banalities, small talk apparently elevated to be meaningful. Perhaps it’s meant to ground it all in reality. Instead, it prompted me to ask why.

Really, why is that Jodie Foster was living in France for a nine month period and had a new ability after that incredible 1976 to choose her own roles. She chose to act in a local film in its local language and she nailed it.