Audrey Tautou and Guillaume Canet, two of France’s brightest young stars, headline Ensemble, c’est tout (Hunting and Gathering), a not particularly original "opposites attract"-style love story that is made more than bearable by the affable actors and the work of writer-director Claude Berri. The adaptation of the bestselling novel from French writer Anna Gavalda is frothy and intelligent in all the right places, at least until the film’s overly clichéd ending robs it of much of its off-kilter charm. Since its release in France three weeks ago, it has already seduced 1.5 million viewers; the film will be released across the continent later this year, probably with similar results.

 

Berri is probably still most well-known abroad for the critical and box office success of the diptych Jean de Florette/Manon de Sources, an adaptation of the two-part Marcel Pagnol novel L’eau des collines. In the twenty years since the release of those films, Berri made several more historical epics that drew large crowds (Germinal, Lucie Aubrac) but has increasingly made smaller, more intimate contemporary dramas such as La débandade (Hard Off), Femme de ménage (A Housekeeper) and L’un reste, l’autre part (One Stays, the Other Leaves). With Ensemble, c’est tout, the setting is again contemporary but the realism of many of his previous features is gone, traded in for a sort of magical realism that is closer in spirit to the world of glossy wish-fulfillment commercials than that of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez.

 

The set-up of Ensemble, c'est tout is classical romantic comedy. In Paris, an anorexic artiste called Camille (Tautou) works as a cleaning lady in anonymous office buildings to make ends meet. She lives in an unheated garret in an enormous 18th century apartment building that also houses the spacious apartment of the blueblooded gentleman Philibert (Laurent Stocker, excellent). He shares the baroquely decorated rooms of the house -- that actually belonged to his recently deceased grandmother -- with his rather improbable and moody housemate Franck (Guilaume Canet), a bike-riding chef who visits his grandmother Paulette (Françoise Bertin) every Monday and pretty much works all other days. No points for guessing who is the sidekick and who is the true love interest for Camille – almost against his will at first. (Extra points, however, for those who noted the nice symmetry in the importance of the grandmothers.)

 

This does not mean that Ensemble c’est tout is wholly vapid or without merit, however, and much of its charm is derived from the fact that Berri and his two stars seem to knowingly exploit the fact that they are in a high-budget mainstream film. Camille, Franck and Philibert are each allowed small character transgressions that seem to rebel against the established rules of the romantic comedy and integral to their characters at the same time. All the difference is in the writing. When in Prête-moi ta main (I Do) -- a bona fide French romantic comedy success from last year --- Charlotte Gainsbourgh’s character says "I need to take a dump" because she has to say something repulsive to shock a bourgeois, it is funny. When Camille likewise is allowed to use gros mots in Ensemble, c’est tout, it is not only funny, but it also tells us something about her character. It is the difference between a romantic comedy that cares more about the laughs and one that cares more about the characters; Berri’s latest definitely is part of the latter category, even though he does not follow this through to the end.

 

That Camille and Franck are meant to be together is obvious (just eyeballing the poster explains as much, and the French title literally translates as "Together, That's All"), but the meat of the story is not in the happily ever after part, but in everything that precedes it. Franck is portrayed as a somewhat boorish womanizer who nevertheless has a heart of gold (he visits his grandmother every Monday!) and Camille as an isolated artist who is not only mentally but also physically tortured – by her difficult mother and her work situation and her anorexia respectively. What brings them together is the jolly good Philibert, who might be selling postcards at a museum gift shop but who is every inch the gentleman when called upon by the circumstances to take in the ill Camille, much to the general disapproval of Franck, who philosophizes that "whenever a woman stands between two men, things get messy".

 

Within the established framework of his romantic comedy, Berri has a lot of fun toying with preconceived notions of sexuality and compatibility. Franck’s above statement is but one that asks a lot more questions than it answers and this is reinforced by the fact that it is never explained how come the two men who are polar opposites are roommates (opposites attract?) and by Stocker’s played-up effete ways, which are effectively subverted later on when Philibert falls in love with a girly girl (a plot development that could have used some more screentime). Likewise, when Franck and Camille finally seem to admit they are attracted to one another, it is Camille who makes all the moves, effectively reducing the womanising bad boy to a shy schoolboy who might be afraid of the possibility of love -- though all she wants is sex, as simple as that. It is she, another girly girl, who has the power.

 

The ambiguities are there for those who want to see them, though the film can at the same time be read as a simple tale that reinforces conservative family values. Certainly the ending, in which Cannet’s character is clearly seen as the provider of the family who supports Camille (in the last shot even physically), seems to point in that direction. A more ambiguous ending along the lines of the superb closing minutes of Quand j’étais chanteur (The Singer) would have made Ensemble, c’est tout perhaps a better film, though one that would have then needed a different title. In this film, the characters get a happy ending they do not really deserve: they are better and more interesting than stock characters stuck in a modern fairy tale.