Critic, nascent filmmaker and insolent wag Jean-Luc Godard called the 1957 film version of "The Pajama Game" the "first left-wing operetta." While he wasn't right _ plenty of earlier Broadway entertainments leaned to the left, and a few made it to the screen that way before "The Pajama Game" _ the show's merry depiction of labor unrest and romantic complication at an Iowa pajama factory was unusual stuff for musical comedy.
"Footnotes" is, too, though it owes enough to "Pajama Game" and especially the Jacques Demy musicals "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "The Young Girls of Rochefort" to qualify it as both unusual and pretty derivative. This easygoing but drab French import provides some low-keyed diversion in its tale of Julie, a young woman (Belgian actress Pauline Etienne, wonderful in other things, a little lost here) whose first day on the job at a luxury shoe factory coincides with management plans to downsize and produce the shoes in China.
The French-ness of "Footnotes" is made clear by one protest sign brandished by a factory worker: "PROFITS=UNEMPLOYMENT!"
Newcomer Julie, who gets around on a scooter, engages in a wary flirtation with a surly but hot bus driver (Olivier Chantreau), whose country-tinged explanatory ballad contains the lyric: "I'm just a lonesome trucker/ Hauling 10 tons of the blues." Early in "Footnotes" the action shifts to Paris, where the female stockroom staff confronts management. Song and dance in humble realms of stylization ensue. Now and then, the writer-director team Paul Calori and Kostia Testut bust loose with a genuinely lively sequence, notably Julie Victor's ode to the revolutionary-red shoe nicknamed "The Rebel" that may save the company. But much of "Footnotes" feels uncertain in its workaday realism and tentative performance quality.
The main drawback? The music. Olivier Daviaud's score, cheesy in its synthesizer fills and random in its song-genre rotation (country! samba! swing! terrible '80s pop ballads!), prevents "Footnotes" from acquiring a personality of its own. Still, I did like those red shoes. Maybe there's a musical in that. "The Red Shoes"!
