‘The Valet’

Like Francis Veber’s other farces – ‘La Cage aux Folles,’ ‘The Closet’ and ‘The Toy’ – this one is set for a Hollywood remake.

By: Elise Nakhnikian
   The Valet is like a graham cracker: If you’re in the mood for a little something sweet, it’ll do, but there’s nothing particularly memorable about it.
   The clever, cartoonish opening credits are reminiscent of The Pink Panther — a comparison that doesn’t do this movie any favors. Gad Elmaleh is endearing in the title role, but he’s no Peter Sellers. And this talky movie has none of the brilliantly timed slapstick that brightened up even the lamest entry in the Pink Panther series.
   François Pignon (Elmaleh), an unassuming young man whose saucer eyes make him look like an overgrown boy, ekes out a living parking cars he could never afford at a fancy restaurant with a money view of the Eiffel Tower. All the good things in life seem as tantalizingly out of reach as that tower, including the love of his life, Émilie (Virginie Ledoyen, looking like Natalie Portman’s less impish older sister), who says she thinks of him as "a kid brother." But when smarmy businessman Pierre Levasseur (Daniel Auteuil) gets caught in a paparazzi shot with his young supermodel mistress, Elena (Alice Taglioni), and his wife Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas) sees the picture, François’ life goes into turnaround.
   The valet happened to be at the edge of the photo, so Levasseur tells Christine that Elena was with him. To make the story believable, the businessman hires François to live with his mistress for a few weeks — long enough to throw off the investigator his wife has hired to follow the faux couple around. Meanwhile, the jealous Levasseur has his own man tail them, scrutinizing his photos for signs that they’re acting their parts too convincingly.
   From then on, the movie is basically a series of riffs on the theme of a self-effacing, regular guy being paired with a gorgeous, self-assured "top model," with a lot of zipping around Paris and its outskirts, slamming of doors, and opening and closing of curtains. It’s also the story of an underdog’s triumph, as the two young innocents — for Elena, improbably, turns out to be almost as pure of heart as François — triumph over the venal and untrustworthy Levasseur.
   A series of minor characters pop in and out of François and Elena’s story. They’re meant to amp up the laugh meter, and the best of these repeated references, like the ones to the drunken mother of a friend of François’, do build up to a final gag. But most of these characters — like a doctor who’s always sicker than his patients and an oily suitor who courts Émilie — wind up feeling almost as tiresome as they would in real life, since the jokes that defined them when they first showed up are never expanded on.
   Writer-director Francis Veber has made a string of highly successful farces. Almost every one — including La Cage aux Folles, The Closet and The Toy — has been remade in Hollywood, and this one will be too: It’s scheduled to be shot in English by the Farrelly brothers next year.
   Veber’s broadly caricatured characters, innocent heroes and happy endings make his movies a natural fit for Hollywood. So does the sanctimonious, audience-flattering way he sets up straw men (like the homophobes in La Cage aux Folles and the hypocritical business tycoon of Valet), encouraging us to savor our sense of superiority as we cluck at their unenlightened behavior and cheer their defeat.
   Ever since L’Emmerdeur (1975), François Pignon has been a recurring character in Veber’s work, what the writer-director calls "a kind of alter ego character, a good-luck charm." He’s not exactly the same person from script to script, but he’s always an everyman, someone who seems like a loser at first, though he triumphs in the end. Elmaleh plays Pignon like a kid drawing on an Etch-a-Sketch, fiddling almost imperceptibly with the dials until a picture emerges on the blank screen.
   Similarly, Scott Thomas brings the wily and formidable Christine to life by underplaying her part. The English actress’ French accent is impeccable, since France is her adopted country (she left home for Paris in her teens, and later married a Frenchman).
   There are a few funny lines, too, like when François asks Elena why she and her fellow models walk down the runway "like horses." But a quick cameo by Karl Lagerfeld, who pops up at the end of a fashion show to bask in the audience’s applause, preening and smirking like a parody of a designer, is quirkier and more memorable than anything else in this feather-light farce.
Rated PG-13 for sexual content and language. In French with English subtitles.