Une femme de ménage

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.

Yet another small gem from that great year of French pics 2002. The talent is out of the right bottle too if anybody asks you, writer director Claude Berri and male lead Jean-Pierre Bacri, no slouch as a writer himself. To a certain extent is IS a male fantasy with Emillie Duquenne all but throwing herself at Bacri who has to be twice her age at least. But, as others have pointed out in these boards Bacri is basically decent and certainly wasn't looking for a May-December affair only for someone to police his apartment. For reasons of her own Duquenne developed what seemed to be genuine hots for him and naturally he's not going to turn down an attractive young girl. There's no special insight nor is any attempted, it's just a record of a brief fling in which nobody really gets hurt and we get to see some pleasant Parisian locations and listen to some pleasing music. Lemon soufflé anyone.

I almost gave up on this one forty minutes in. Don't you do that. The ending is superb.

Premise: working class girl gets dumped by her boyfriend and seeks work by housekeeping.

Well, that can lead to something better if you keep house for the right person.

Jacques (Jean-Pierre Bacri) who recently got walked out on by his wife, and who, not so incidentally looks sixty--well, fifty-five--(actually he was barely fifty when this was made, but you get the point) gets his ad for a housekeeper answered by Laura (Emilie Dequenne) who is twentysomething--a young twentysomething.

I guess there is not much else to say, and to be honest I decided I would force myself to watch the inevitable. But the director is Claude Berri who directed two of the best movies I ever saw: Manon of the Spring (1986) and Jean De Florette (1986).

And so I stayed with it. At about the fifty minute mark the movie started to get interesting. I could feel that old guy/young girl love affair was going to take an unexpected fork in the road. (As Yogi said, if you come to a fork in the road, take it. The players have no choice.) Obviously, old guy/young girl can end only one way: young girl leaves old guy for young guy. This is biology. It will be painful.

Claude Berri knows all this, and probably a lot better than I do. And so guess what? Well, I won't tell. But you will find that the last thirty-some minutes of this sexy romantic comedy delightful, and especially the very, very clever and most satisfying ending.

Just prior to that Laura asks Jacques for his blessing. He won't give it, but she is right: he should. And then when we get the final "life is so...lifelike" grimace on Jacques's face, we can only smile.

Emilie Dequenne is delightful as the strangely wise and very natural Laura, and Jean-Pierre Bacri is winning as the old guy who knows better, but on reflection should thank his lucky stars.

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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.

Please, it's "aspirateur" not "respirateur". Having lived in France for many years I've seen similar situations develop countless times. I've also seen many Claude Berri films and he has got it down pat. It was pleasant to recognize the familiar Paris neighborhood scenes and to wax nostalgic over such familiar goings on. The two leads are most realistic and the supporting actors lend a tone of verité. All in all, a most realistic slice of life à la française. For anyone who has lived in Europe this film will be a pleasant reminder of the sophisticated approach and attitudes that the Europeans (especially the French)bring to situations such as the one depicted in this movie.