Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

ThurstonHunger I enjoyed this film in ways that made me indirectly think of HBO's "Sex in the City." Not just for the frank discussions, nor for the fact that I preferred the women just talking amongst themselves (coworkers together, and also coworkers with clients) rather than interacting with the men in their lives..."Sex in the City" flipped more than a few stereotypes, and in "Venus" we find the lead character a woman who has grown weary and too jejune for "je taime". She's not so much in a state of despair as one of dispassion. We see men in films like this...and watch as somehow they are wooed back to vivaciousness, but not often do we see similar women.I mean, I don't *really* think Stella ever lost her groove, it was more like she knew it was under the blankets on the floor. But Nathalie Baye's fallen Angele is past searching for Mister Right, she's hooking up with a series of Monsieur Wrong Nows. Light spoilers follow...I'd recommend seeing this film, and I would echo what another reviewer stated, this probably will be appreciated by a slightly older audience. Or more honestly, by jaded types of any age!For other reviewers here and elsewhere who seem to take a tack of, "Why, I'd never..." Um, even if you swear on a stack of Emily Post's books, still I think if your husband cheated on you and you accidentally shot him in the face, who knows...you might. And more to the point, maybe you should... Mishima liked his women to have a flaw, although he was more partial to a physical one to set off the pure beauty...the same axiom can be applied to personality traits. So lighten up and embrace your dark side. Just don't shoot anybody...Anyways back to this film, there are also nice touches of humor throughout. A lot actually. And poignant scenes too, such as when Angele talks to a girlfriend not from the salon. I really liked the open dialog between those two, their blunt assessments of each other. The old dramatic element of visiting one's nemesis under disguise or false pretenses worked as it almost always does; here we see it when Helene comes to the salon.As for the salon itself, well people have talked about its pulsating pinkness. There may be no glass ceiling, but there are certainly glass walls housing them. It makes for a nice dichotomy between women on display, and the actual women inside. Only Audrey Tautou remains under glass even when she's taken out of the shop...in a very steamy, or actually smoky, scene. That scene is doubly voyeuristic, and her *small* role here hits about 11 on the naif scale.Tautou is gorgeous no doubt, but for those of you who spend all your time slow-motioning her strip-tease, you are skipping over the real beauty of Venus, Baye's performance here is a gem...with some defining blemishes. You could draw parallels from her Angele to Kim Catrall's Samantha, I honestly preferred the former. I never thought of the "Sex in the City" fantastic four as remotely real, I did not need to do so to enjoy them. I feel similarly about the Women from Venus. And I only had a one-nighter with them, whereas I saw Carrie and company off and on for years.7/10

konotok this film (or should i say movie) was one of the most trite unentertaining pieces of garbage i have ever seen. The worst part about it was the script, although the acting was horrible over done as well. Boring cinematography as well. I kept wondering if this was an attempt at american film making by a french director. It had all the makings of a porno without the saxophone dub. I would strongly recommend that you forgo this awful nonsense. perhaps the worst french film ever made (but its hard to say due to Man Bites Dog)

senortuffy This story revolves around the employees of a beauty shop in Paris. It's not quite an ensemble piece because there is a main character.Nathalie Baye plays a 40-year-old woman, Angèle, who is going from one fling to another. Angèle doesn't believe in love anymore. She thinks it only brings pain and that love is a form of slavery. She's a very attractive woman but looks sad all the time and her friends notice.Audrey Tautou plays Marie, another worker at the salon, and she's a plain country girl who starts having an affair with a much older man. Mathilde Seigner plays Samantha, who is tough on the outside and has lots of boyfriends, but is hurting inside (she tries to kill herself on Christmas Eve).But Angèle is the focus of this film. We see her sitting with a man in a train station cafe at the beginning of the film, confident that he's enamored with her, but he brushes her aside, saying it was just an affair, and walks away. Then Madame Nadine, the beauty shop owner, tells her she needs to fix her appearance and apply more makeup, which only adds to her depression. Along comes Antoine, a much younger man, who saw the spat at the train station and who follows Angèle back to where she works. He approaches her and professes his love for her, really his obsession for her. Angèle isn't interested in a relationship and Antoine isn't interested in casual sex, so things don't look good for the pair. But as the story progresses, she opens up to him and by the end they're both in love with each other.I would have liked the film more than I did if the character of Antoine had been different. He's got a good physique and is much younger than Angèle, so I can see why she'd be attracted to him, and she's a good-looking woman, so I can see him being attracted to her, but as two people, I didn't really see the chemistry between them. Antoine seemed a bit too immature to make this romance seem true. But he is open and tender, and Angèle is vulnerable and needs some extra care, so maybe that's the key.Anyway, the characters were all interesting and the acting well-done. There was a tender poignancy in the relationships between the people in the beauty shop and their customers, as well as some pretty funny scenes, and the film explores some adult themes about the nature of love and relationships, so I would definitely recommend this one even if it might have been better.

Frogwoman01 Netflix described this movie as follows: "With "Venus Beauty Institute," French writer and director Tonie Marshall takes us into this world of beauty and self image and into the lives of four strong, smart woman who make their living practicing beauty at a Parisian spa."I was waiting throughout the entire movie for a glimpse of a strong woman...every woman in the entire movie seemed to me to be needy, insecure, wounded, angry, naive, or self destructive. The implausible plot of the very appealing Antoine, falling head over heels for Angele, I just didn't buy it. Not to mention, why did they have to make him already engaged to someone else? So throughout the whole thing, I'm feeling pissed off that he is betraying his fiance, while wooing this already completely screwed up woman, who has no faith in men already, but this guy is supposed to restore her faith in men, only he is destroying the life of another woman in order to restore the faith of this one????? The whole premise really upset me. I just wish the movie had been described differently. As women with low self esteem and issues with men, dealing with their issues in their own uniquely unhealthy fashions.