In Venus Beauty Institute, Baye plays a 40ish beauty salon attendant named Angèle who sustains herself with flings, like a precocious college student. She asks nothing of the men she sleeps with, yet in her love shy way, she's a bit of a pill: Her refusal to get involved is a means of punishing herself and her lovers.
At the pastel salon where Angèle works, the kitschy harp glissando that's triggered each time the door swings open seems to be mocking her sadness. The other attendants are much younger, and the movie, a mournfully talky comedy of romantic vanity, could almost be ''Sex and the City'' as directed by Eric Rohmer. Angèle finally meets a suitor she can't shake, a chivalrous stalker who is intellectually breathless in his declarations of love.
''Venus Beauty Institute'' is clever and smooth, yet, like Angèle herself (or Nathalie Baye), the film is almost too placid for its own good. It made me long for a dash of that old Eurostardom.
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