Imagine a birthday dinner where everybody at the table cheerfully admits to the birthday boy that they're not really his friends. Elsewhere, this would be sheer rudeness. But in France it's "delightfully French."
A sweetly-melancholy and wise little "buddy film," Patrice Leconte's My Best Friend is a rumination on mid-life crisis, regret and, yes, friendship. It manages to make its points with low-key drama and a minimum of antic behaviour, and -- in a Hollywood flourish -- wraps up its emotions into a neat package after one gimmicky catharsis.
The birthday boy is Francois (Daniel Auteil), a dealer in antiquities and partner in a gallery. From the moment we meet him -- at a competitor's funeral, where he gently makes a sales pitch to the widow over her husband's properties -- we get the sense that something is missing in his life. At an auction, to the consternation of his business partner Catherine (Julie Gayet), he becomes obsessed with an ancient Greek urn depicting two famous friends of classical mythology, and begins bidding through the roof to obtain it.
His friendlessness comes to a head at said birthday dinner, where even his own daughter (Julie Durand) doesn't seem to like him very much.
When his partner Catherine begins to poke at the subject of his friendlessness, his bourgeois crowd helps provoke the bet -- produce a best friend in a month or lose the urn.
I don't know if we're supposed to find Francois dislikable, but his "friends" certainly are, inclined as they are to share the company of people they don't like. Catherine may be the exception, since she actually seems to like Francois, though their relationship is so all-business, he has no idea she's a lesbian.
In any case, a desperate Francois decides to handle the "friend" issue the way he does everything else, by papering it with money -- interestingly, he has a girlfriend, Marianne (Audrey Marnay) who practically begs for his attention, but doesn't appear to figure in the equation.
Francois hires a gregarious, trivia-spouting taxi driver named Bruno (Dany Boon) to teach him to be likable -- a project doomed to failure as much by Francois' social ineptitude as by the fact that Bruno is only superficially a charmer, and his real life is cursed with loneliness.
The lessons lead to an obvious plan B, which is to embrace Bruno as a friend -- though that has its problems, some of which are class-based. Profound betrayal leads to estrangement, which leads to the movie's Hollywood climax (involving, believe it or not, an appearance on the French version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and the judicious use of a "lifeline.")
Leconte's film is nothing if not pleasantly entertaining in any language, and it will invariably get you thinking about whoever it is that qualifies as your best friend.
(This film is rated PG)
More Movie Reviews
