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List Price: $14.99 | | Label: Miramax Home Entertainment
Salesrank: 43646
Released: January 20, 2004 |
| Our Price: $5.17 |
| Used Price: $2.18 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Oscar(R) winner Juliette Binoche (Best Supporting Actress, THE ENGLISH PATIENT, 1996; CHOCOLAT) and Jean Reno (RONIN, THE PROFESSIONAL) soar together in a wonderfully fun and sexy comedy where opposites don't just attract, they collide! Pampered beauty queen Rose (Binoche) and over-stressed insomniac Felix (Reno) have only one thing in common: They're through with bad relationships and have both sworn off the opposite sex. So when an airline strike grounds these total strangers together in Paris -- and they're forced to share the last available hotel room in town -- neither can wait to leave the other behind. But the more they try to go their separate ways, the more obvious it becomes that there's no place else they'd rather be!
Description of Jet Lag:
A glammed-up Juliette Binoche and a slimmed-down Jean Reno are the main attractions in this very slight comedy--sort of a Planes, Trains, and Automobiles without the trains and automobiles. After they meet repeatedly at Charles de Gaulle Airport outside Paris, beautician Binoche and chef Reno decide to share an airport hotel room during a layover. She's a self-dramatizing chatterbox with a fondness for make-up and perfume; he's a fussy neurotic who can't stand artificial fragrances. They've just met and they're headed to different parts of the globe, but still... could this be... amour? Director Daniele Thompson, whose previous feature, La Buche, was a much more entertaining effort, would like it to be so. But the setting gets monotonous and the stakes never seem terribly urgent. Without the Chocolat smile of Binoche and the uniquely rough-and-tumble coolness of Reno, this one would never get off the ground at all. --Robert Horton
Jet Lag Reviews:
'Streetcar named Desire' it ain't 
2009-10-22 - This wasn't bad. It had its moments, the tension between the protagonists (what does that word really mean anyway?) was basically fun. I didn't really buy the 'Hollywood' ending though. It was inevitably the only logical way it could end and yet somehow it kind of ruined it. Liked it better when they were questioning and probing each other than falling head over heels in rapture. But that's what movies like this are made for I guess.
Sweet Romance 
2009-04-29 - Juliet Binoche is "Rose", a beautician waiting for a flight to a new job and life in Acapulco, Mexico. Her "baggage" is a boyfiend (Sergi Lopez) in bad need of an anger management class. Jean Reno is "Felix," a confirmed misanthrope, on his way to a funeral in Munich for the mother of an ex-wife. His "baggage" is his father, a master French chef of fine cuisine living in Burgundy. The father's constant disapproval of Felix's cuisine inventions has discouraged Felix from being a fine cuisine chef himself.
Felix is a successful but much less than happy frozen food executive with two failed relationships with women when he meets Rose. Both Felix and Rose are stranded in a Paris airport for the night due to a transit strike, faulty airline computers, and bad weather. Felix loans Rose his cellphone when they accidentally bump into each other as strangers.
Most of the inter-personal drama between Rose and Felix takes place at the airport Hilton where Felix is put up for the night by the airline because he is flying first class. He reluctantly invites Binoche, who gives a first impression of being nothing more than cosmetic, to share the room non-romantically after he sees her trying to settle down to sleep in seats in the airport and takes pity on her.
Casting Binoche as a beautician whose life revolves around makeup is inspired. It gives the camera many opportunities to persistently focus on one of the most beautiful faces in modern cinema. Even when she takes her makeup off Binoche is an exquisite beauty. She is also a surprisingly good romantic comic.
The deep-voiced Reno manages to look jet-lagged, world-weary, and handsome all at the same time. His Felix finds Binoche by turns mundane and fascinating. Her homespun wisdom changes him, of course, for the better. True love cannot be denied even though we see a couple so seemingly poorly matched at the beginning of the movie.
If you don't mind English subtitles in this French film it is well worth adding to your collection. The musical director even manages to effectively slip in a little of the plaintive music from "Midnight Cowboy" toward the end of the movie. This film is highly romantic and entertaining. It is also priced right on Amazon.
a little gem 
2008-01-13 - One of my perennial romantic comedy favorites, this French film is delightful. The sets, as well as the characters, are very colorful and the actors who play them (Jean Reno and Juliette Binoche) are marvelous. This movie is always a lovely rewatch. The only lamenting thing about rewatching it is realizing how pitifully and dully Hollywood makes romantic comedies.
Jet Lag is a big yawn.
2007-10-25 - Jet Lag (Décalage Horaire) is a yawn, a big 80-minute yawn, to be exact. I always wonder what attracts gifted French actors like Gérard Depardieu, Daniel Auteuil, and Juliette Binoche to the genre of light romantic comedy, of which Jet Lag is a typical example. Directed by Danièle Thompson (La Buche; Avenue Montaigne), Jet Lag stars Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno (The Professional). After dropping her cell phone into a toilet at the Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, elegant beautician Rose (Binoche) asks scruffy French chef Félix (Reno) if she can borrow his phone, and soon they are sharing a room together at the airport Hilton, where they spend most of their time breaking down each other's defenses before falling into Light-Romantic-Comedy-Love together, the kind of love which never quite seems quite real. (When it comes to love, the film, it seems, strives to be a Hollywood movie, only in French. How do you say "predictable" in French?) Whereas Félix is hoping to reconcile with his estranged ex-wife, Rose is running away from an abusive relationship. She has all the looks and he has all the money. I'm a huge Juliette Binoche fan, and her performance will undoubtedly save Jet Lag from obscurity. In fact, Binoche carries the film with her performance as Rose. When she claims to be a Nobel Prize winner in beauty, I believe her. As Rose drops her emotional baggage, she simultaneously wears less makeup. That was a nice touch. Félix claims he has earned a fortune selling frozen foods to Americans. I liked the second half of the highly-polished film better than the first, and although it has many insightful and charming moments, for 80 minutes Jet Lag just taxis down the runway and never really takes off.
G. Merritt
Another enjoyable comedy from Daniele Thompson
2007-10-23 - "Décalage horaire" (2002) aka Jet Lag was the third film written/directed by Daniele Thompson that I've seen. It may not be as marvelous as La Bûche (1999), her directorial debut or charming and delightful as Fauteuils d'orchestre (2006), her latest film but it is definitely worth seeing for the wonderful acting by two fine French actors, Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno who both played against their types. Binoche does not appear often in the comedies and Reno is not well known as a romantic lead but they were pleasure to watch in the light romantic dramedy that takes place in the famous Paris Charles de Gaulle airport one long rainy night when all flights were grounded by weather and a baggage strike. Two strangers meet by chance, when Rose (Binoche) who had accidentally flushed her cell phone in a toilet, asks a perfect stranger, Felix (Reno), to use his phone. They are both professionally successful. He is a chef who made a fortune in the frozen-food business, and she has won a golden brush, the equivalent of Pulitzer Prize for the make-up artists. Their personal lives are the mess. Each has the problems, disappointments, unsatisfying or unfinished relationships by the time of their first encounter. She flees from her abusive boyfriend of 12 years (Sergio Lopes is memorably scary in a tiny cameo). He still can't recover from his previous relationship and suffers from anxiety attacks. Perhaps, 81 minutes is not enough to convince us that these two flawed and insecure individuals will overcome their past and live happily ever after but Binoche and Reno masterfully and elegantly created on the screen the possibility of love and readiness to accept it.
3.5/5
