A not-too-subtle indictment of the wasteful living among the idle rich, this is a love story where the right people are supposed to get together for the right reasons.
By Bob Brown
THIS is a frothy French romantic comedy in a style that has gone out of fashion but which, when well done, is welcome back. Director Pierre Salvadori returns with writer Benoit Graffin, the team who gave us Après vous… (2003), another light comedy. Salvadori seems to have a special affinity for the humor derived from characters in the serving classes.
In Après vous… it was Antoine (Daniel Auteuil), a Paris waiter who tries to save Louis (José Garcia) from committing suicide over his failed love affair. Antoine lives to serve, and he will not give up on Louis, even to the point of disrupting his own home life. In Priceless (Hors de Prix) it’s Jean (Gad Emaleh), a bartender at a fancy hotel. Jean just can’t say no to any request. He winds up walking every woman’s dog — all at once — as they tug him around the boulevard. Then he’s exhausted tending bar until closing time.
But as in Salvadori’s previous film, an unexpected event pulls our hero out of his routine. When Irène (Audrey Tautou) slips into the bar late after Jean’s fallen asleep on a couch in the lounge, she mistakes him for another patron who has despaired of the bartender arriving. She complains of the service and asks him to wait with her. In this meet cute, the guy plays along with the girl, and offers to fix her a drink anyway. “What if someone else arrives?” she asks him. “I’ll just pretend I work here,” he says, expertly mixing her a champagne cocktail, garnished with star fruit and a colorful paper parasol.
Several parasols later, the couple are drunk and bedded down in the Imperial Suite, Jean’s supposed luxury digs. Of course we know where this will end as soon as a bellhop arrives with a largish English family who are inspecting their room. The masquerade is up, Irène is out the door in a huff, and Jean is on the street without a job. If that were that, there would be no movie. But of course, Jean has been smitten and tracks Irène to her next hotel, where he tries to apologize. But he has disrupted her gold-digging plans. Irène lives off sugar-daddies who buy her whatever she wants. She will punish the devoted but outclassed Jean by draining his bank account with her lavish taste.
And that too would be the end of it, except that another twist finds Jean in the clutches of a rich widow who needs a boy-toy. Now Jean is a kept man as Irène is a kept woman. The plot turns on his inexperience, as Irène catches his game and decides to give him tips on how to get more out of his woman. His ingratiating ways and his skill at serving others make him the perfect subject for Irène’s tutelage. Soon they are comparing notes and baubles.
This kind of comedy requires actors with just the right light touch and sense of madcap fun. Tautou has proved herself in the popular Amelie (2001), but Elmaleh is a relatively new face. What makes him so funny is his deadpan, slightly bewildered look. If the role required just a bit of acrobatics, he would be a latter-day Buster Keaton.
What’s also required in this kind of film is a lavish cornucopia of luxury goods in extravagant settings. Gilded hotels in Nice and Monaco provide the locations, and the elegant meals (often as not delivered by room service) are displayed with the offhand nonchalance that befits those who never have to pore over a bill.
It’s a catalog of luxury brands in clothing, shoes, jewelry and watches. Always thin, Tautou has lost even more weight since her last film. Black designer gowns drip over her frame as if it were a clothes hangar. The jazzy score, with some selections from American pop music as well as a French jazz band, is from Camille Bazbaz, who also enlivened Après vous…
Although the movie is a not-too-subtle indictment of the wasteful living among the idle rich (none of whom, it seems, are young), it’s basically a love story where the right people are supposed to get together for the right reasons.
Are Jean and Irène the right people? Who knows. She’s really cute and sexy, and he’s appealing and eager to please in a lost-puppy kind of way. They’re both young, they’re both poor, and they’re both at loose ends on the Cote D’Azur. What more do you need for a romance that makes about as much sense as anything that ignites from the spark of a look or a touch. Or a shared secret life. Logic plays second fiddle.
Rated PG-13 for sexual content, including nudity. In French with English subtitles.