Cocktail chemistry and raw calculation initially bring the lovers in “Priceless” together. Whether something more profound will deepen the bond between Irène and Jean is, of course, a staple of romantic comedy. This French import from director Pierre Salvadori is no exception. Nor is it exceptional, although it features amiable performers as the unlikely pair.
Audrey Tautou of “Amelie” fame is Irène, a lovely piece of arm candy working her wiles at the classier hotels on the French Riviera.
tagromantic comedy
When freshly reeled-in fiance Jacques passes out, Irène wanders the hotel. It seems a force of habit, this prowl.
At the bar, she finds no bartender but does find Jean (Gad Elmaleh) napping. He’s nice enough to fix her a drink, then another and another.
The movie hinges on this moment of mistaken identity. If you buy that Irène, self-disciplined to recognize wealth, would mistake Jean for a patron, not a prole, simply because he’s wearing a tux (that, and he lets her assume otherwise), then we’ve got a nice wrought-iron monument to sell you in Paris.
Later — many cocktail umbrellas, a couple of rolls in the Pratesi sheets and one former fiance later — Irène discovers that Jean is not her latest tycoon but a now-smitten hotel employee.
Early in the movie, Jean is pulled along the beach by the dogs of the rich and tanning. Showing Jean being dragged by the pooches hints at the fact his own behavior is decidedly Pavlovian. One running joke is his reflex to serve. Anytime someone rings a bell, snaps a finger or just calls out, Jean is set in motion.
Irène’s best laid plans, so to speak, must begin again. She pages through her black book, works her mobile.
Meanwhile, Jean has become dogged. How far he will go to woo Irene is the central conceit of the barbed comedy. (Were the movie robbed of Camille Baz baz’s snare-drum sexy jazz score, it could easily play out as a dour drama.)
Marie-Christine Adam intrigues as Madeleine, the older woman who rescues Jean by putting him on an equal footing with Irène’s gigolette.
Unlike Jacques (Vernon Dobtcheff) and later Gilles (Jacques Spiesser), the men Irene banks on, Madeleine is almost worth rooting for. Chalk this up to Adam’s dance of reined-in need and silken superiority but also to the sense that Tautou and Elmaleh never share a truer chemistry.
There are the fish-out-of-water comedies and, in the case of the the gently appealing Elmaleh, a growing guy-out-of- his-league subgenre.
Last spring, Elmaleh starred in Francis Veber’s similarly themed and far more agile “The Valet,” where he pretended to be the lover of a supermodel for a wealthy industrialist.
Granted, the improbable is the purview of comedy. But instead of waiting for that movie-magical moment when we’re convinced that these two do indeed belong together, we’re more curious to see how Salvadori and co-writer Benoit Graffin plan to make us believe this flimsy make-believe.
Pulling that off would indeed be priceless.
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com
“Priceless”
PG-13 for sexual content including nudity. 1 hour, 44 minutes. Directed by Pierre Salvadori; written by Salvadori and Benoît Graffin; photography by Gilles Henry; starring Audrey Tatou, Gad Elmaleh, Marie-Christine Adam, Vernon Dobtcheff, Jacques Spiesser. Opens today at Landmark Greenwood Village.
