Directed by Pierre Salvadori
Starring Gad Elmaleh and Audrey Tautou

Watching Hors de Prix made me feel small and naïve. It made me feel unworldly and inexperienced with film and cinema and actors and writing and stories. It made me feel like I have no idea what the fuck I am talking about. I am still pretty sure I don’t.

Why?

Because I absolutely loved this film. I was charmed, willingly beguiled by Elmaleh’s adorable obedience and modesty. I fell for Taurou’s pouty French lips and impossibly long cigarette. Yes, in yet another failed attempt at reviewing a movie objectively, I have fallen in love with it, characters, actors, and all. I have been sexually involved with Hors de Prix.

But in all seriousness, I have legitimate doubts about my ability to judge something objectively at this point and you should too.

I think this time I was completely taken by the culture the movie seems to take for granted. France is a place where everyone is beautiful or rich, it isn’t a punishable offense to smoke indoors, and wildly improbable things happen on a regular basis. Indeed, the story begins with a situation that could very easily have turned out otherwise: Jean (Gad Elmaleh), a hotel bartender, is asked to work an extra day by his boss, to close the bar on that extra day by his coworker, and to leave his post and smoke a cigar by a resident of the hotel, three requests he could have denied. In any case, he has a wonderful one-night stand with Iréne (Audrey Tautou) in a conveniently vacant presidential suite after wooing her with his skills as a culinary artist. The same thing happens exactly one year later, except this time they are busted by an employee trying to sell the room.

Iréne, we find out, is a golddigger. Her rich, million-year-old husband-to-be realizes she slept with another man and leaves her with nothing. The rest of the movie focuses on her obsessive desire to acquire money and expensive things and Jean’s consistently rejected attempts to impress and eventually win her.

Just to get this out of the way, there is an element of the film that can be seen as a glaring fault. Most of the major plot-motive events happen as a result of random things that would not occur in real life. The French may make me drool with their suave ability to act like film noir archetypes or ride Vespas without looking silly, but France is not Macondo or Yoknapatawpha. Assuming the ritzy hotels that are the setting for most of the movie aren’t Pan’s other labyrinths, the significance of the regular happenstance comes off as kitschy and unbelievable.

That is one of the few things I found wrong with this film, and trust me, I looked hard. Elmaleh’s performance alone easily outweighs the sometimes negligible inconceivability of the plot. Before I betray my feelings about his decidedly believable character, however, I must offer this disclaimer: the only jobs I have had have been in restaurants. It is entirely possible, indeed probably the case that it is for this reason that I found Elmaleh and the entire filmic sketch of Jean to be convincing, believable, and moving.

In short, Elmaleh was great. Much of the film focuses on Jean’s discomfort with life in the wealthy world to which he has so often been the servile appendage. While eating at a restaurant, for instance, he flinches or jumps to attention when someone snaps or calls for a waiter. The first time he dines with his older partner, he literally cannot sit still; his natural impulse is to move constantly, to make sure the customer is happy.

Anyone who has worked in the service industry knows this is no exaggeration. It easily could appear as such if not for Elmaleh’s deftness with Jean, however. He always remains true to the humble discomfort the role demands of him. In one particularly resonant (for some reason, “heartbreaking” and “touching” seem like colloquial oversimplifications) scene, Jean, after having rented a hotel room for what seems to be the first time in his life, picks up a woman’s bags when the clerk calls for a bellhop. The other characters stare at him like he is an alien, but the audience (I was the only person in said audience) wants to start crying.

Gad Elmaleh as Jean, a character in whom I see the same obsessional desire to please the Other and complete absence of fashion sense that I see in myself.

Tautou (of Amélie and The Davinci Code [gag] fame) does a more than good job entrancing the viewer as Jean’s foil, enemy, love interest, and sometime competitor. Her ability to seem at once emotionally invested in someone and disinterested to the point of boredom is remarkable and frighteningly familiar. In one particularly memorable scene, she and Jean show each other the “looks” they use to woo members of the opposite sex. Jean’s expression is just like his character: down to earth, nothing special, and most assuredly not an act. Iréne’s, on the other hand, is so convincing that Jean thinks she has stopped acting.

Audrey Tautou as Iréne, the not-really-femme-fatale. This is actually the most attractive actress in the world. I know, it seems improbable, but she is. Love me, Audrey.

The film itself is shot nicely, but in nowhere near the same noticeable and unique fashion as a movie by a director or cinematographer with a distinct style, i.e. Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, or Stanley Kubrick. The people and places the camera captured were beautiful, but this was more a result of brilliant performances, an appropriate script (from what I could tell from the subtitles), and an image-enhancing infatuation with the characters that I projected onto the screen myself.

To be honest, while some may not like my annoying tendency to debase my own opinions and observations with claims of bias and pollutive subjectivity, I think that is the only way to offer a point of view someone will appreciate as having any worth at all. At the end of the day, I know about as much about film as you do, unless you are Helen von Schmidt, Christian Rogowski, or any one of the directors, actors, or cinematographers whose names I am going to delight in dropping in the coming posts. I entered the theater having never heard of anyone involved with Hors de Prix. I am not at all more qualified than you to say something about this film. So take my opinion as just that: at best equal, and probably something worse.

I can tell you with complete certainty that I was charmed by Hors de Prix in the fullest sense of the word. I read the New York Times review of the film shortly before writing this one. It made me angry. Whoever wrote it seemed totally bored. Maybe I just haven’t seen enough movies to recognize a formula when I see one or to write about how bored I am in the country’s most reputable newspaper and get paid for it. Maybe I’m not yet experienced enough to feel that it is OK to watch a film with a disinterested refusal to be impressed.

I don’t know. Perhaps I am too young and inexperienced to watch movies and know what I am talking about when I review them. All I know is Hors de Prix was impossibly charming, totally enjoyable, and $8.50 well spent.

Grade: A-