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Travolta and Me (1993)

★★ — Travolta and Me (1993)

Patricia Mazuy made this short film for the Franco-German broadcaster ARTE at a relatively early stage in her career, a few years after her debut feature Peaux de vaches (1988) and before her more widely seen Sport de filles (2012). Running at just 69 minutes, it sits comfortably in the territory between short and feature, the kind of modest, precisely scaled work that television co-production in France made possible throughout the early 1990s. The story is set in the late 1970s, when John Travolta's popularity, riding the back of Saturday Night Fever and Grease, had made him a genuinely global phenomenon among teenage girls, and Mazuy uses that obsession as a lens for examining adolescence, desire, and the particular magnetism of American pop culture on young Europeans.

Travolta et Moi (1993) arrives with a wave of critical acclaim (particularly in French cinephile circles) but lands with a thud for anyone allergic to a certain strain of 90s arthouse posturing. It follows a young woman adrift in Paris, drawn into the orbit of an older, self-serious guy who dispenses pseudo-philosophical ramblings with the confidence of a man who's read one book too many. He quotes poetry, muses on cinema, and performs intellectualism as seduction, all while she listens, wide-eyed and impressionable. What some critics hailed as "lyrical" and "observational" plays, ninety minutes later, as deeply tiresome: a film mistaking pretension for profundity. The John Travolta obsession framing device has a certain wistful charm, and there are fleeting moments where the film captures the ache of youthful longing. But these are buried beneath endless scenes of a man talking at a woman rather than with her, his monologues landing less as romance and more as emotional vampirism dressed up as sophistication. A well-intentioned but deeply dated character study that mistakes verbosity for depth. Its defenders will call it nuanced; its detractors (myself included) will call it the cinematic equivalent of being trapped at a dinner party beside a man who won't stop explaining Taxi Driver to you.

Rating: ★★ | Year: 1993 | Watched: 2026-04-03

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