Leconte and Klotz present as striking material that is fundamentally a conventional French import. With Hallyday the movie may acknowledge French fascination with American pop idioms, and it may have Rochefort express French cultural sophistication with a piquant yet droopy irony (suggesting all that awareness cannot do to enliven your life), but it's selling that sophistication all the same. Leconte's handling is moderate, cool, and swift, but the contents are what the intended audience expects, in this country, certainly. There's probably not an American who sees this movie, skeptics like me included, who won't listen to Manesquier and think, I'd take the boredom if I could live in that classy French villa or manor or château or whatevertheycallthem, with real school-of-Géricault right on the walls. But whereas for Americans it can't be self-congratulatory as it can for the French (and I say that believing what the movie shows, that there are working-class Frenchmen who are glad they were brought up to respect their literary heritage), for us it is all the same a contrived piece of cultural tourism that almost inevitably elicits a smarmy response.

You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.

Alan Dale is author of Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.