Une femme de ménage

A tender, surprising little film with superb performances, fine writing, good filmic qualities, and a superb music script, Une Femme... touches the veiwer, provides laughs, allows self-recognition, and shows the relative maturity of the experienced against the unintended heartlessnes of the young in a sophisitcated society. Very French. The man is intellectually prepared but still has to deal with the emotions of loss, despite the utterly ill-suitedness of his new love. The girl's neediness for approval and "love" demands his response, to which his kind and needy heart does what we expect.

A perfect slice of life as has defined French film for so long. Happily. And well. Chapeaux

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.

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.

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.

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.