European Films

French director Patrice Leconte takes things easy in his latest film Mon meilleur ami (My Best Friend) or How to Gain a Friend in Ten Days. Predictable from start to finish, this is the type of dramatic comedy that often gets labelled as pleasant, which means that it is not laugh-out-loud funny and inoffensively hobbles along to an ending that could have been spotted miles away. With Daniel Auteuil as the successful art dealer who is clueless about friendships and friends, this item could find some success offshore as a French comedy with a big name director and star in much the same way as Francis Veber’s La doublure (The Valet), which also starred Auteuil and co-starred Dany Boon, who is Auteuil's foil here.

 

Patrice Leconte’s previous film was the long-awaited threequel Les Bronzés 3: Amis pour la vie (Les Bronzés 3: Friends Forever), and in Mon meilleur ami it is again all about friends, though for the latter film the absence of friendship might be a better description. The best friend of the title is in fact what Auteuil’s character François is desperately looking for after a bet with Catherine (Julie Gayet), his partner in an antiques business, challenging him to present her with his best friend in ten days or forfeit an expensive red-figure vase some 2,500 years old.

 

Rather than plainly telling her he does not have any real friends let alone a best friend, François puts himself through all kinds of embarrassing situations to first ascertain he does not really have any friends and then goes a desperate manhunt for the ideal best friend – or, at least, a good enough best friend for François to get to keep the vase.

 

The set-up is vintage farce material, and this is where the problem lies: Leconte, whose previous films such as L’homme du train (The Man on the Train) and Confidences trop intimes (Intimate Strangers) where interesting character studies with undercurrents of comedy, here tries to do the opposite but has trouble developing his characters as human beings because of a plot that is solely interested in comedy, comeuppance and clichés. Compared to Mon meilleur ami, the characters in the all-out comedy Les Bronzés 3 seemed like creations from Balzac.

 

The plot of Mon meilleur ami may be farcical but Leconte and his actors seem to have set in the real world (or a very similar version of it) and it is hard to believe that a successful or at least formerly successful partner in a Parisian antiques business such as François is so desperate to learn how to make friends that he literally chases people down the streets to ask them how it’s done. After several unsuccessful attempts, François is forced to offer money to a trivia-spouting, working-class taxi driver (Boon) to teach him how to win friends. During their lessons... well, you get the idea.

 

The screenplay from Jérôme Tonnerre and the director and based on an idea by Olivier Dazat seems to enjoy and emphasise the gap between the uptight and clueless petit bourgeois and the working-class simpleton who has all the secrets to a richer and fuller life but fails to address the more obvious gap between the real world we see on screen (courtesy of cinematographer Jean-Marie Dreujou’s jittery camerawork) and in the natural play of the actors, and the plot elements that would be ridiculous in any version of the real world. The failure to make the events that happen in Mon meilleur ami credible are its biggest flaw; without this credibility the comedy does not work and the character development rings false.  

 

Buy the DVD at amazon.fr.

 

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