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Smaller textFrench comedy basks in a warm afterglow
Jose Garcia and Sandrine Kiberlain
Paramount Classics
Director: Pierre Salvadori.
Stars: Daniel Auteuil, Jose Garcia, Sandrine Kiberlain.
MPAA rating: R for language.
Now playing: Cinemagic Manor Theatre
But they are what they are. And what they are becomes part of an equation that is complicated by what you bring to them.
Sometimes you catch yourself rooting for a movie that's in front of you that isn't quite working but that curls up next to you like a kitten at your ankle, as if to say, "Like me. I mean well."
Such a film is the darkish French comedy "Apres Vous." Running nearly two hours, it all but abandons the sense of itself as a comedy in the last act -- all the more oddly for striving to be a screwball comedy earlier.
Directed by Pierre Salvadori from a screenplay by himself and Benoit Graffin and David Colombo Leotard and based on a story idea by Daniele Dubroux, it has in actor Daniel Auteuil a huge asset.
Auteuil is THE French movie star of the past 15 to 20 years -- skilled in drama and even more in comedy, where his deer-in-headlights eyes betray a mind that's racing to keep up with circumstances beyond his control.
He ranks with Pierre Richard, Gerard Depardieu and even Jean-Paul Belmondo as the funniest and most-inventive French actors since Jacques Tati and Fernandel.
Auteuil plays Antoine, the utterly dedicated maitre d' and sommelier at a Paris brasserie called Chez Jean. Because he cannot deny or disappoint anyone deliberately, he is perpetually late and emotionally exhausted.
He's years overdue marrying live-in girlfriend Christine (Marilyne Canto).
Antoine is minding his business when he happens upon a suicide in progress. He rescues the tree-dangling Louis (Jose Garcia), a long-unemployed stranger who has just been dumped by girlfriend Blanche (Sandrine Kiberlain).
Acting as always in accordance with his inner Samaritan, Antoine assumes the responsibility for the forlorn Louis' life.
The two charge off to another city to intercept a suicide letter Louis had mailed to his virtually blind 87-year-old grandmother, Rose (Andree Tainsy).
Antoine gets the wine-ignorant Louis a job as Chez Jean's new wine steward.
And Antoine finds Blanche, who's about to marry another guy. How better to help Louis than to the restore the fractured romance?
Little of this manages to be funny, but it flirts with endearment.
Auteuil knows what he's doing. It appears more than director Salvadori can't quite get the measure of funny scenes and keeps flattening them.
Deadpan can be riotous; Buster Keaton taught us that. But Garcia, who is reasonably attractive and able-bodied, makes Louis too much of a willful dead weight rather than a guy who's goofing up but trying to work with his rescuer.
"Apres Vous" may not work as well as it might, but it entertains and ignites a warm afterglow anyway.
