Claude Berri's film has all the qualities you could want in a housekeeper if not all you could want in a film. Efficiency: the "exposition" is taken care of in the fully explored messy apartment during the opening credits. Attention to detail: the bourgeois divorcé tidies up the place beforehand to make it presentable for the cleaning woman. Thoroughness: every centimeter of the tightening bond between the middle-aged employer and his soon homeless young employee, every millimeter of the closing chasm between his classical CD and her rock-and-roll boom box, is scrupulously marked. Yet somehow this characteristic sample of French intimism is too circumscribed for its own good, inching toward a puny punch line that only spotlights the smallness. It is an unfailing pleasure nonetheless to observe the frowning, scowling Jean-Pierre Bacri (Same Old Song, The Taste of Others, etc.), who always appears to be in disagreement with the last thing he ate, and a very fresh pleasure to observe the strong-jawed Emilie Dequenne (Rosetta and Brotherhood of the Wolf only), who beautifully fits a space without needing to fill it or rule it. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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