Laura wirbelt Staub auf

"Housekeeper (Une femme de ménage)" is a wry commentary on mid-life relationships that teeters on being male fantasy wish fulfillment.

Writer/director Claude Berri uses visual and musical metaphors to show differences between characters, building on the central character's work as a sound engineer recording classical music and jazz.

Jean-Pierre Bacri recalls the mid-life crisis role he wrote for himself in "The Taste of Others." We are very slowly introduced to his stuck in the mud life and the cause for it, and then slowly see him come back to life to deal with his feelings.

Amusing touch that the titular nubile nymphet eschews modern conveniences in cleaning while listening to pounding hip-hop dance music. Her taste in music and manipulative need for a rent-free apartment is about all that's realistic about her.

Would a Hollywood version let everybody finally act their ages?

He's 50ish, contended being recently single, and in need of a housekeeper for his small bachelor flat in Paris. She's young, beautiful, deliciously jiggly, most accommodating in every way, and in need of work. He hires her as a part time housekeeper and she slowly insinuates herself into his life while he simply enjoys her, keeping things in perspective in a most mature way. "The Housekeeper" is a delightful for-men-only slice of life flick which is a sweet little tonic for the male midlife crisis. Go ahead, guys. Admit you're human and enjoy. (B)

Claude Berri's latest film that just arrived in America is tailor made for losers of a certain age. M. Berri's picture is a fantasy that most men, abandoned by their former partners, for whatever reason, can dream of a great affair with a Lolita-like woman, who also can clean and put order in their own messy lives.

Jacques lives alone, but he can't bring order into his own existence, after his wife leaves. He then decides to take a chance on an inexperienced young woman, who has more than cleaning in mind. Laure, the housekeeper, he hires, is a woman in need of a great make over. She is as plain, as she is decent; she doesn't even know how to clean the apartment with the vacuum cleaner, preferring to do it the old fashioned way.

Slowly, but surely, she begins to attract this lonely Jacques, until they end romantically involved. Just when one thought this was the romance of a lifetime between these two star crossed lovers, M. Berri has a surprise for us.

Both Jean Pierre Bacri, as Jacques, with his Beagle face and droopy eyes, and Emilie Dequenne, as Laure, are very good.

This movie has a light plot and lightly written characters: a middle-class neurotic-grumpy-artist falling in love with his young-trashy-placid housemaid. There is a very fine line between lightness and shallowness and that movie can't avoid falling into clichés, especially regarding the world outside the two main characters (like: the ex wife sleeping with the best friend). But the actors Emilie Dequenne and Jean-Pierre Bacri are just so generous towards their characters that they make them real, and utterly lovable. They are captivating and make that little unpretentious movie an enchanting delight.

The best thing coming from this Berri film is that plausibility and prediction conspire to improve a weak plot. The spectator, however, gets the surprise of his life when, in a sudden twist, the film reveals he has been watching the wrong movie. Give the kudos to the actors: sexily believable and deceitfully ordinary. Jacques and Laura, the main characters in this autumn-spring old line plot, early show their true self. She, young and beautiful, knows he is in a middle of a sentimental crisis. He, mature and confused, is never deceived by her egotist intentions. A sexual relationship is sure to occur, and so it does. But, it comes as a strange mix of feelings and desires, that the film never gets it clear. That's the relevance of this story: life cannot be deconstructed and explained in terms of art. Just the mirror, as the good Stendhal knew almost two centuries ago. Une femme de menage (more explicative than the English title) is a quiet thought on the passing of chances and the options we make; and a lecture on the futility of adapting our expectations to a self-deceitful sense of self-importance.