Palais royal!

PALAIS ROYAL!

The opening night movie of a well-attended film series tends to be something lightweight and a bit glitzy that's designed to be a deliberate crowd-pleaser, and the gala opener of the 2006 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Today at Lincoln Center -- a film featuring Catherine Deneuve as a haughty queen mother -- is an elaborate, sometimes vulgar and slapstick, but mostly fluffy comedy about a principality like Monaco or Luxembourg and the things that happen when its ruler suddenly dies. The late king's spoiled second son ascends to the throne bypassing his more serious, well-educated older brother because the latter isn't married. Arnaud's do-gooder wife (played by the writer/director, French comic Valérie Lemercier, a popular French comedienne more known in the US for starring in Claire Denis's well received and serious sexual adventure Friday Night/Vendredi soir).

Lemercier's character gradually turns into an ambitious new princess like Lady Di, and along with general laugh-manufacture, the film constitutes a satire on such behavior and the packaging and promoting of modern-day high-visibility "royals." There is no faulting the actors, and Deneuve is as droll as she's elegant, Lambert Wilson is stylish as the lazy new king, Michel Aumont is imposing as the chief of protocol and Michel Vuillermoz is appealing as the sad elder prince. But though Palais Royal! moves as rapidly as a comedy should, it's a bit hard to be interested in this theme at a time when people are starving and being tortured and real social gaps are between rich and poor, with a feudal aristocracy no longer a real issue.

We begin with future king, wife, and two best friends on a shopping spree in London, and there is nothing to like about these spoiled people – which of course is the point; and the French are good at doing grumpy, obnoxious snobs (Pierre Bakri in last year's Look at Me/Comme une image is a splendid example) – but this makes it hard to stay interested in these folks. It's also hard to read the subtitles, and I couldn't follow the fast "comic" dialogue. Probably only the French people in Alice Tully Hall were able to find that dialogue consistently funny, and only some of THEM. Clearly there was a lot of word-play that the subtitles, when one could read them, obviously was struggling to convey.

The glitzy fluff was there, there was fluency in the flow of the action, there was a satirical point of view, there were highly regarded actors. If it was hard to sit through this and make it to the wine and cheese and French celebrities, but since I was gearing up to watch all fifteen handpicked new French films in a row it still seemed like a pretty soft job.

(Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2006 opening night presentation, March 2006; Palais Royal! opened in Paris November 23, 2005.)

Awful, awful, and awful ! Even worse than " Brice of Nice" ... Even worse than " Arbres" ... Not even a glimpse of interest ! Vulgar, rogue, ... The only consolation I had was to see it on a DVD . Wasting ten dollars for such a crap in a theater would have been just unbearable !!!!!! I you want to see a Valerie Lemercier at her best, pass your way on Palais Royal and try to find the one and only " The Visitors" DVD one of my funniest movies! Actually, speaking of "Palais Royal", I really don't understand how such good actors like Denis Podalydes or Valerie Lemercier herself have accepted to play in such a movie. Oh, sorry, I was forgetting : Valerie Lemercier is the Director ! As a lesson, good actors don't always mean good film makers.

MutantMutton

Reviewer destinationssecretes sums it up well: vulgar and rogue. And pedestrian... Deneuve is excellent though. Lemercier can be pretty funny if directed well, that is obviously here, not by her own self...

This is, of course, a comedy. So, let's talk funny: three testicles theme, the whole Deneuve character, the opening London sequence, personal trainer guy - very funny. The whole thing is a bit long, but quite enjoyable. I'm just wondering if they also ridicule the Belge (the only French-speaking continental people with royalty), as it goes along, but I don't know French enough to catch the nuances. One interesting quality - since it is a poke at the English, the humour is very held-back (not the usual French buffonade), easily the "English gentlemen"-like comic routine, perfectly in line with stuff like the "Stiff upper lip". I guess it is THE stylistic gimmick used here, apart from the obvious Diana satire, to our delight.

First of all, I am a huge fan of Valérie Lemercier! She's been entertaining us for nearly 20 years and she's still surprising us yet. "Palais Royal !" is her third work as a director, and it is the funniest. Her previous two efforts were good, but with this one, she proves herself as a great writer.

The storyline is very simple : After the King dies, her husband (played by the always classy Lambert Wilson) is destined to take the crown, and her to become part of a world she doesn't really know of. As you can see, the plot is very basic, but what shows Lemercier's cleverness is her ability to laugh at the clichés and the explore every little details of her characters. Her screenplay is full of subtle jokes and plays of words - some can regret that a few jokes are a bit... vulgar, but always very funny if you can understand the double meanings.

As for the actors, we have a royal cast here: Queen Catherine Deneuve (who's never been so funny), the sarcastic Michel Aumont and the hilarious Gilbert Melki, among others (all are very good). Last but not least, Valerie Lemercier shows us one more time she's a gifted actress by handling all the versatility of her character.

"Palais Royal !" is the best French comedy of the year !