European Vacation

Avenue Montaigne is textbook Francofilm.

by Michael Atkinson

Shock and Aww: Jessica (Cecile De France) silently counts the number of times she's watched Amelie. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Daniele Thompson's Avenue Montaigne — originally titled Orchestra Seats — is a pop-French movie-movie paradigm, performing like a racehorse at exactly the tasks we've expected French movies to do best since the salade days of Jacques Demy: intimate realism, effervescent romance, sly urban comedy, idealized Gallic savoir-faire.

In fact, the film's American title suits it perfectly, because it's a tourist rubdown — from the very first scenes, we're presented with a City of Lights postcard, complete with charming accordion score, Eiffel Tower vista and fetching young heroine (Cecile De France) happily lost in the soft glow of a Parisian morning. Movies at their pulpiest are akin to hypnotism — some of us are simply susceptible to being entranced by fluff and silliness, while others are constitutionally resistant. So while there's little question that Thompson's portrait of cross-purposes and love lost and regained is an expert suite of lovely cliches, how delightful you find it depends on your capacity to swallow — even savor — yet another draught of Frenchified cuteness and generous serendipity.

You'd think Thompson's movie would get the self-respecting French citizenry's back in the air, as Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie did, but apparently it was a hit at home. Thompson crafts the narrative in a manner made familiar by Eric Rohmer, Cedric Klapisch and Agnes Jaoui — while initially we follow De France's impish, sunny Jessica to Paris and a waitressing job on the titular upscale boulevard, soon we're introduced to a brace of additional and intersecting tales, all of which involve adorably lost Parisians facing dissatisfaction and deciding to remake their lives from the ground up.

Lefort (Albert Dupontel) is a fabulously successful concert pianist whose desire to scrap his high-brow, over-scheduled career for something freer and looser is met with his wife's marriage-wrecking disapproval. Jacques (French cinema pillar Claude Brasseur), a widowed millionaire art collector, decides, with his new trophy chick, to sell off his entire collection in an auction; his son Frederic (Thompson's son and co-writer Christopher) is a frustrated, lonely academic with a ruined marriage. Catherine (Valerie Lemercier) is a bipolar soap opera actress appearing in a Feydeau play, torn apart by self-loathing for her TV fame and worrying about her aging place in the stable of French thespians. ("Bellucci!" she spits disgustedly.) Each mini-drama has its emotional screws tightened by the upcoming and simultaneous play premiere, concert and auction; Jessica trips through each strand, connecting them and searching for love in all the right places.

Thompson's cast is uniformly heartfelt and huggable, particularly De France, who with each blinding smile brightens the dank memories we may still harbor of her from the French serial-killer hit Haute Tension. The juice of Avenue Montaigne, as per Rohmer's legacy, is its infectious, high-octane good spirits and behavioral bounce, but the film's ambitions are just so high — as high, in fact, as its downwardly mobile characters. If you're one of the easily hypnotized, it's an old-school Euro-vacation daydream, untaxed by risk, sorrow or real drama.

(m_atkinson@citypaper.net)

Avenue Montaigne

Directed by Daniele ThompsonA ThinkFilm release