French comedy about the common humanity of disparate types. It marks the directorial debut of actress and author Agnès Jaoui, overseeing a calm and comfortable camera and a soft, sedate color palette. She, in collaboration with her long-time partner Jean-Pierre Bacri, is best remembered as the co-writer of Alain Resnais's Same Old Song. Both writers also played major roles in it. The pair collaborated on the present script as well, and again take major roles on screen. The dyspeptic Bacri (an economically expressive actor) is in fact the focal figure in the ensemble, a married industrialist currently involved in tricky negotiations with unseen Iranians, forced to brush up on his English for the purpose. And the focal relationship, the one that bridges the widest gulf, is his teenagerish crush on an aging stage actress (the dolorous Anne Alvaro, an actual stage actress unknown to American moviegoers, and as such, a real revelation) who moonlights as the industrialist's English instructor. The mismatch of philistine and artiste -- along with associated matters of personal taste, bias, judgment, and the like -- is not a subject which Hollywood would be afraid to make hay of. One can readily imagine, or even recall, an equivalent to the scene where the industrialist attempts to regale the theater folk with off-color jokes. But a Hollywood comedy will inevitably feel obligated to enlist the audience on one side or the other (better snob or slob?), sign them up as rooters or hissers, or in short, encourage their ingrained biases and snap judgments. Jaoui, same as Resnais in Old Song, is by contrast even-handed, understated, subtle, dispassionate, tolerant, broad-minded, truly sophisticated, civilized, and adult. In a word, an artist. And her jokes, what's more, are ten times funnier than the Hollywood average. (E.g., the rejected and humiliated suitor buries his head in his uncomprehending wife's shoulder and fails to see that her next question is addressed not to him but to the family dog: "Want a cookie?") The film may be, for most tastes, rather meandering and dawdling, but the presiding sensibility makes it a pleasure all the same. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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